Stakeholders in the education sector are calling for the inculcation of basic life skills in the early stages of children's education.

According to an economist at the University of Ghana, this is essential to ensure that Ghanaian children are equipped with informal skills that extend beyond academics and prepare them for the real world.

Dr. Priscilla Twumasi Baffour expressed this view during an interview on Joy FM's Super Morning Show on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.

"I believe that we should not even wait for students to reach secondary school before introducing skills training. It should start in primary school. For example, when children engage in creative drawing and are encouraged to recycle and use boxes to build cars, their creativity is unearthed," she said.

Dr. Baffour also highlighted the scarcity of resources allocated to training teachers in these areas, particularly in public schools, as one of the contributing factors to the problem.

She believes that despite a slight increase in the pupil-teacher ratio, there are still deficiencies in the system.

The economist further advocated that the informal training system is critically assessed so that "even if you are interested in skill training at that stage, you will still go through the educational system, go through secondary school before you begin to pursue."

"But here, you find that sometimes people would not even finish primary school and they want to go and learn how to sew. They want to go and learn how to be a mason. [They] start by being a laborer, and then learn on the job. The whole format of informalised system within the skill training area is something that needs to be critically looked at because the informality also feeds into the lowly perception."