The acting Director of the Foundation for Security Development in Africa (FOSDA), Theodora Williams Anti, has called on the government to invest more in technical and vocational education training to ensure that the country’s youth come out with useful skills that will make them employable.

According to her, technical and vocational education training provides a more lasting solution to unemployment in the country than many of the government’s employment initiatives, which only appear to be ‘quick fixes’.

Speaking on Citi TV’s The Point of View, Theodora Anti said the government’s temporary employment programs only benefit a select group of people.

“All these interventions are great but can we channel them through a more structured system like our educational system, specifically TVET which will give us a long-term impact and something we can rely on rather than channelling through these programs that benefit only a few people,” she said.


She expressed regret over the decline in funding to TVET programmes in the country and urged the government to invest heavily in that area.

“We support some of these short-term interventions, but we are thinking of long term… We think that over the years, our governments have not invested much in our TVET system. We have only seen between 1%-5% of education funds channeled to TVET,” she added.

The Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Adutwum, has reiterated the government’s commitment to making Ghana the hub of Technical Vocational Education Training (TVET) in Africa.

According to the Minister, various interventions by the government through the provision of infrastructure, equipment, and the reformations in the country’s technical institutions from the senior high technical schools to the technical universities is an attestation of the government’s quest to build a strong economy based on TVET.

Addressing a gathering at the 17th Congregation for the Bachelor of Technology (BTech) of the Koforidua Technical University, Dr Yaw Adutwum in an address said the government has outlined a strategic plan to help promote TVET in Ghana.

“We have aligned all public TVET institutions, and placed them under the Ministry of Education. A five-year TVET strategic plan has been developed as part of the reform of TVET. Koforidua Technical University like other Technical Universities has gotten its share of infrastructural projects.”

Source: citifmonline.com