The World Bank (WB) Country Director, Mr. Mats Karlson, on Monday sustainable macro-economic stability attained by Ghana was not enough since it had not yet led to job creation for the youth. Even though the World Bank Director lauded the efforts made so far over the years, he said job creation was the only meeting point for the economic and social dimensions of any development agenda. "If all the good macro-economic indicators do not lead to job creation we cannot talk of development," he said. Mr Karlson made the remarks at a day's High Level Consultative Meeting on Productive and Decent Work for the Youth in West Africa, with emphasis on the Mano River Union (MRU). The meeting, which was under the auspices of UNIDO and the AU in collaboration with the UNDP, ILO and the United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA), is to develop a set of action-oriented recommendations that would complement efforts at alleviating unemployment and poverty within the sub-region. The meeting also seeks to operationalise the recommendations of the UNOWA report on Youth Unemployment and Regional Insecurity in West Africa and examine past policy programme responses to the challenges that young people faced in West Africa. About 100 participants from governments, development partners, international organizations and the private sector attended the meeting. Mr Karlson noted that Ghana had over the past few years shown that it was committed to accelerated development by embarking on policies that had led to sustainable macro-economic stability, improvement of infrastructure and creation of an enabling environment for businesses to thrive. "What is left for Ghana to do is to begin to embark on action programmes that would lead to movement of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) from the informal to the formal sector in order for there to be more permanent jobs for the youth. "That way, both the economic and social dimensions of development would have been properly taken care of and then we can talk of economic development," he said. He acknowledged that like all other developing countries, especially in West Africa, Ghana needed huge chunks of foreign and domestic investor capital to build on its macro-economic achievements. Mr Karlson, who is also the WB regional representative for West Africa, said it was imperative for African governments to demonstrate commitment to their own development agenda in order to attract the big investment from foreign partners. "The big money will come when African governments are seen to be doing what they set out to do in their own development plans," he said. He re-echoed Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's assertion that Liberia, like other countries in the sub-region, was not poor but largely mismanaged, saying that African governments needed to do a proper management of their economies to ensure speedy realization of their development aspirations. Touching on the on-going energy crisis in the country, Mr Karlson said the option was to adopt a regional approach to the energy problem through an unwavering commitment to the West African Gas Pipeline Project. The Minister of Trade, Industry and Presidential Special Initiatives (PSI), Mr Alan Kyerematen, noted that 60 per cent of the West African populations were youth below the age of 20 and as high as 50 per cent of them were either unemployed or underemployed. He said the situation presented a grave problem for African governments which needed to be tackled vigorously through action-oriented programmes. "The several frameworks, concepts and models for development in Africa are not enough to improve the lot of our youth if we do not take concrete action to provide sustainable jobs," he said and added that "The youth, educated and skilled, are one of the vehicles for accelerated socio-economic transformation of our countries." The Director-General of UNIDO, Mr. Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella, said African states had over the years tried to manage poverty instead of embarking on poverty alleviation programmes as a result of which poverty was always postponed and passed on to subsequent generations. "We cannot keep applauding ourselves for having successful programme implementation in our various countries if those programmes do not provide jobs for our youth," he said. Source: GNA