Former President John Agyekum Kufuor has charged university graduates yet to find employment to think outside the box rather than waiting on the state to give them jobs.

He says the incessant search for jobs by graduates makes what he describes as “office employment” scanty. 

Mr Kufour advised the graduates not to belittle whatever contribution they can offer in generating something to keep their respect. 

"If you are not doing something sooner or later you will begin to degenerate and lose your dignity so even as we know the office employment is getting scarce and scarcer," he added.

Speaking at the “A Conversation on Leadership and the Future of Africa” event, he urged the youth to be innovative to develop a “sense of enterprise” in finding a solution to the graduate unemployment situation in Ghana. 

A recent survey conducted by the Institute of Economic Affairs, (IEA) between November and December 2015 and released in July 2016 found unemployment as the number one problem the majority of Ghanaians are facing.

The study sampled some 1,500 people from across the 10 regions of the country and identified females, urban dwellers and the majority of the residents in the Central, Eastern and Western Regions confirming that unemployment is their biggest worry in Ghana.

Last August, the World Bank's head of operation, Dr Beatrix Allah-Mensah, revealed that Ghana needs to create over 300,000 jobs every year to be able to deal with the unemployment situation in the country. 

Speaking at the launch of the labour intensive public works policy program, she said, is to avoid the increasing rate of unemployment in both the rural and urban areas.

Adding his voice to why the youth should be entrepreneurial in their thinking, he said, “We’ve come to a point where people think when you finish school there is a job for you to be employed. We need to change our mind and become venturesome.

"You have finished, you are graduate, but if you do not get employment opportunities don’t sit and put your hands here like we say in traditional parlance. 

Find a way to keep afloat till when the employment comes along and this will mean a sense of enterprise. Don’t think of the big scale."

He encouraged the youth that "There is still demand around so ask yourself what you can do until the office you are applying for calls you..”