Senior lecturer, Department of Economics,UG, Dr Priscilla Twumasi Baffour
Companies want experienced graduates but are not willing to accept interns
Economist asks government to make agriculture attractive
Agriculture capable of contributing heavily to GDP
A senior lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Ghana Dr Priscilla Twumasi Baffour has called on industry players to join in the agenda of grooming young people in preparation for the world of work.
The struggle for jobs in Ghana is almost directly proportional to the struggle many students and young people go through to get internship opportunities whiles in school. Most students are either being rejected or become redundant at the various companies they intern with, a situation she described as unfortunate.
Speaking at KPMG post-2022 Budget Forum in Accra on Monday, November 22 she said, “Sadly, you don’t find industry willing to accept our students for internship opportunities, why is it that people are willing to work for free but the industry is not prepared? I think it is time we change that culture.
Industry complains that most of our students are not prepared for the world of work but the reality is that yes if KPMG needs one, and a first-class student from the Business School who has also passed their CA and is a Chartered Accountant, he or she needs some level of experience to be able to fit “.
According to her, inasmuch as the tertiary institutions are training and equipping people to become malleable and adapt to societal trends and issues, industry players ought to give an opportunity to people to experiment and get on-the-job skills to help them going forward.
She, however, laments the unattractiveness of the agriculture sector stating that government should put measures in place to create an enabling environment for young people to consider it a worthy venture.
Research by the Ghana Statistical Service has shown that the average age of a farmer in Ghana is between 40 to 50 years. This, she described as alarming and a clear indication that the youth are not interested in agriculture. She believes the agriculture sector has a lot of untapped potentials which when leveraged can make a substantive addition to Ghana’s GDP.