Focus on employment generation rather than job creation – Economist to policymakers
Prof. William Baah-Boateng, Head of the Economic Department at the University of Ghana, has called on policymakers to shift their focus from job creation to employment generation to combat the country's high unemployment rates.
Speaking on Accra-based JoyNews' PM Express on Thursday, May 4, the economist emphasized the need for sustainable employment opportunities.
Baah-Boateng argued that job creation alone is not enough to address the country's unemployment problem, as many newly created jobs are not sustainable and often last for only a short period.
The economist stated that policymakers should focus on creating employment opportunities that have a lasting impact on people's lives and provide them with a sense of job security.
“Yes, you’ve created that amount of job that is fine, but if you’ve created that amount of job and it’s not sustainable – it takes just a week for that job [to be done], the person will come back to ask for more.
“And that is why your unemployment rate will continue to rise because you’ve created a job for a person and that job lasted for only one month or only a week. So after that, the person joins the unemployed," Baah-Boateng said.
He stressed that policymakers must look at the net effect of employment generation, taking into account the number of people who leave their jobs against the newly employed ones over a given period.
“Policymakers should move away from job creation to employment generation. This is where they employ someone and it can last at least six months,” Baah-Boateng said.
His comments come in the wake of a report by the Ghana Statistical Service's Quarterly Labour Statistics, which revealed that about 1.76 million people were unemployed in the third quarter of 2022, with two out of every three unemployed persons being female.