Our job centre targeting 8,000 permanent jobs for graudates within five years – YEA boss

The Youth Employment Agency (YEA) is eyeing the creation of 8,000 permanent jobs for unemployed graduates, at least within the next five years, its Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Justin Kodua Frimpong has disclosed.

The agency will achieve this through its recently introduced Job Centre in a bid to reduce the high levels of unemployment in the country.

This, the Agency will do by connecting both skilled and unskilled graduates to employers for them to venture into sustainable jobs for a living.

“Since we started the YEA Job Centre in 2019, we have had over 60,000 youths sign up and that was the starting point for us. So what we at YEA are looking at is that for years to come, our district offices should have a database. But from our job centre and our analysis, we are looking at around 8,000 persons in permanent jobs in five years,” Mr. Frimpong said on Face to Face on Citi TV on Tuesday.

Recently, the YEA through the Centre organized a job fair where many unemployed youth massed up at the Accra International Conference Centre in search of jobs from several employers.

The youth, numbering over 1,000, were seen standing in long queues, with many of them struggling to enter the building to secure jobs with companies.

The YEA boss admitted that the lack of employment opportunities for graduates is a huge hurdle both the agency and the government must immediately cross and find a lasting solution to.

He admitted that the lack of ‘exit strategy’ in most of the government’s employment social intervention programs is a major contributor to the rising joblessness in Ghana.

“If beneficiaries after two years have to exit the program and reapply, we are not creating employment with the current modules we are running. So what is the exit strategy for the beneficiaries who go through our module for two years? Over 600,000 youths have gone through our program, but years after, we can not pinpoint and say this particular number of people have exited and transitioned into permanent jobs”, he explained.

This, Mr. Justin Kodua Frimpong, said the YEA is strategizing to address.

He added that pressure on the government to absorb the youth onto the government’s payroll is nearly impossible given the current circumstances, saying “when we say jobs, it’s not always about government sector work.”

---citinewsroom