Youth Development and Empowerment Minister George Opare Addo says one of the biggest obstacles to tackling youth unemployment was not the absence of government programmes, but the failure to coordinate them effectively across ministries.

Speaking on Wednesday, July 8, the minister said the government spent its first year and a half trying to understand the real causes of youth unemployment before rolling out interventions.

“Within the last one year and six months, it’s been very tough. That I must admit, it’s been very difficult, and it’s been very challenging,” he said.

According to him, addressing youth unemployment requires long-term planning because investments in young people do not produce immediate results.

“The problem with youth or youth unemployment is that youth issues - I call investment in young people an investment, and you reap the dividends with time.”

Mr Opare Addo said the ministry commissioned a series of surveys to gain a clearer understanding of the challenges facing young people.

“In the last one and a half years, we needed to understand what the real issues were, and so we commissioned a few surveys.”

He said the findings have now given the ministry a clearer direction.

“And God has been so good. At least today, I’m able to tell you that I have a very good appreciation of what the issues are, and based on what the survey told us, what the research told us, we are using it to tackle our problems.”

The minister said the research also uncovered a major structural weakness within government.

“What I also saw at the ministry was that it was not that we lacked programs; there were more than enough programs to fix the problems.”

Instead, he said, implementation and coordination were the biggest challenges.

“The challenge was implementation and how we are able to coordinate these programs effectively.”

Mr Opare Addo explained that youth-related interventions had become scattered across different government institutions, leading to duplication and inefficient use of resources.

“There was a lot of fragmentation at the ministry, and because there was not a ministry responsible for coordinating all the activities of youth, you find one issue with one ministry.”

He said different ministries often ended up implementing similar programmes for the same target groups without working together.

“So one ministry says I’m doing A. We find another ministry says it’s doing B. It ends up being the same program, same beneficial result, but no resources.”

According to the minister, the ministry is now relying on evidence from its surveys to better coordinate youth initiatives and improve the effectiveness of government interventions to reduce unemployment.

He expressed confidence that a more coordinated approach, backed by research and proper implementation, would deliver better outcomes for young people over time.