The International Labour Organisation's (ILO) is predicting a 71 million global youth unemployment in 2016. Majority of the unemployed youth, according to the organisation's World Employment and Social Outlook for 2015, would be from developing countries.
The ILO Director and Special Representative to the United Nations, Mr Vinicius Pinheiro, made this known at the ongoing United Nations 54th Session on the Commission on Social Development (CSocD54) in New York.
Presently, the unemployment rate in the world is 197.1 million which is one million more than the 2014 figure and over 27 million higher than before the world economic downturn about a decade ago.
The world's unemployment rate, he said, showed an increment of 0.7 million since 2014.
Mr Pinheiro, however, lamented the fact that the increment in the global unemployment rate 'all happened entirely in developing countries'.
Unemployment in Ghana
According to the World Bank, 4.60 per cent of Ghana's 26 million people are unemployed.
Mr Pinheiro said the situation of unemployment was problematic for young people, who were three times more likely to be unemployed.
He was further of the view that the situation was not only with the quantity of work but the quality as well.
He said the lack of decent work had contributed to a chronic shortage of global demand which was hand in hand with widening income inequalities.
He said the relative stagnation of labour incomes depressed consumption, deteriorated social conditions and increased social unrest.
'In short, economic growth is not helping and efforts would need to be redoubled to achieve the sustainable development goals,' he added.
Mr Pinheiro was of the view that international policy coordination was needed to address dysfunctionalities in the financial system and make it more conducive to the expansion of productive investment and generation of decent work.
He said macroeconomic policies, including monetary and fiscal policies, were needed to incorporate explicit full employment targets as part of their ultimate objectives.
Mr Pinheiro, in pledging the ILO's commitment to help member countries to implement decent work policies, called for synergies and complementarities to be explored with other intergovernmental bodies that could also provide a valuable contribution to the review of the decent work policies.
Social protection
Commenting on the unemployment situation in Ghana, the acting Director of Social Protection of the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Mr Richard Adjetey, said the Labour-Intensive Public Works (LIPW), which is a public safety net programme being piloted in 60 deprived districts since 2015, had provided 33,600 jobs, especially in rural centres.
The project, he said, was aimed at helping to reduce unemployment as well as reduce rural-urban migration.
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