Former President John Mahama has revealed that he will set up a ministry to address youth development and unemployment if elected again in the December 2024 polls.

Addressing a student forum at the Wisconsin University, in Accra, the NDC’s flagbearer explained that the increasing unemployment rate in the country necessitated this decision.

“As reported in the 2021 Population and Housing Census, Ghana has a working-age population of 19.9 million people. And out of this 1 .6 million are unemployed,” Mr Mahama said.

“The general unemployment rate currently as announced by the Ghana Statistical Service stands at 14.7%, an alarming increase from the 8.5% in 2016. The higher unemployment ratio is among those with a tertiary education. And so it means that you are punished for successfully achieving tertiary education,” he added.

The former President indicated that to address these challenges, the Ministry of Youth Development will solely focus on developing youth's talent and placing them in available job market slots.

“This ministry is going to cut across all ministries because it is going to input policy for employment of young people in all the ministries, from education to health to agriculture to industry to trade and every other ministry,” he said.

This comes after a study by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), released in February 2024, revealed that more educated Ghanaians cannot find work to do, although they are available to work.

Almost a quarter of persons representing 22.3 percent who experienced an unemployment spell for 21 months from January 2022 to September 2023 had completed tertiary education, while almost 48 percent of persons experiencing an unemployment spell had completed secondary education.

The GSS study defined an unemployment spell as an uninterrupted period within which a person had stayed unemployed, although he had the capacity and the willingness to work.

The Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, presented the labour statistics contained in the Ghana 2023 Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) quarter three labour statistics bulletin in Accra.

The survey, the Government Statistician, said, found out that the country had approximately 1.3 million people that had remained unemployed for six months in the second quarter and third quarter of 2023.

Read More: More people with higher education unemployed – GSS report

Youth unemployment, which was 1.3 million among people between the ages of 15 and 35 years, Prof. Annim said, contributed to more than three-quarters of the total unemployment population of 1.85 million in the country.

“Under the survey, the population that we need to think about in terms of youth employment is a figure around 1.3 million. This figure is an indication of a 14.6 percentage increase in the first three-quarters of 2022 relative to the first three quarters of 2023,” he said.

Prof. Annim stressed that policymakers must direct their attention to this category of persons. 

He said if the government was putting out any intervention, that was the population to target.

“So if there was an initiative to employ 200,000 youth, the figures should give a sense of how long it was going to take the country to get rid of the 1.3 million youth unemployed population,” he stated.