From the Classroom to the Workshop: Why Ghana's TVET Schools MustReplace Social Studies with Entrepreneurship Education

There is a question that has been sitting quietly in Ghana's technical and vocational education space for some time now and it deserves to be asked loudly: why are students who come to TVET schools to learn welding, auto mechanics, cosmetology, catering, and building construction spending precious curriculum hours studying Social Studies?

This is not an attack on Social Studies as a discipline. In the context of basic school and even general secondary education, it serves a purpose. It builds civic awareness, it teaches about Ghana's history and geography and it situates young people within the broader society they inhabit. But in a TVET environment where the entire philosophical foundation of the education is practical, applied and market-facing Social Studies is, to be blunt, occupying a seat that Entrepreneurship Education desperately needs.

Ghana's TVET sector sits at a peculiar crossroads. The government, through the Ministry of Education and COTVET (the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training), has invested significantly in repositioning TVET as a credible and aspirational pathway rather than a consolation prize for students who could not secure Senior High School placement. Skills training centers have been upgraded. The NVTI (National Vocational Training Institute) has expanded its reach. Technical and Vocational institutes from Accra to Tamale are enrolling more students than ever before.

And yet, walk into the workshop of any TVET graduate three years after completion, and you will find a consistent pattern: technically competent young men and women who do not know how to price their services, cannot write a simple quotation letter, have never drawn up a business plan, and have no understanding of how to register a business with the Registrar General's Department. They can fix an engine. They cannot build a business around fixing engines.

That gap the gap between skill and enterprise is precisely what replacing Social Studies with Entrepreneurship Education would begin to close.

The Mismatch Between TVET's Purpose and Its Curriculum

TVET schools in Ghana exist, fundamentally, to produce employable and self-reliant citizens. The COTVET mandate is explicit on this point. The skills-based curriculum is designed to reduce dependence on formal sector employment and equip graduates to create livelihoods for themselves and others in the informal and micro-enterprise economy.

This is a worthy and urgent goal in a country where youth unemployment remains a persistent challenge, where the formal economy cannot absorb the volume of graduates entering the labour market each year, and where the bulk of economic activity takes place in the informal sector market traders, artisans, service providers, small-scale manufacturers.

Social Studies does not speak to this reality. It does not tell a young electrician in Kumasi how to manage cash flow during slow seasons. It does not tell a dressmaker in Takoradi how to build a customer base on a zero-advertising budget. It says nothing to the plumber in Sunyani about the difference between revenue and profit or about why keeping a simple record of daily income will save him from financial confusion six months into running his own business.

Entrepreneurship Education does all of these things. And in the context of TVET, it is not a luxury add-on. It is the missing second half of the qualification.

What Entrepreneurship Education Actually Teaches

There is a tendency, even among educators, to mischaracterize Entrepreneurship Education as a soft subject a few motivational talks about "believing in yourself" and some loosely structured exercises about "business ideas." That version of entrepreneurship education is useless, and it should not be what anyone is advocating for.

Properly designed Entrepreneurship Education at the TVET level covers content that is directly operational for the kinds of micro and small enterprises that TVET graduates are likely to start or join. It includes financial literacy: understanding income, expenditure, profit margins, savings and basic bookkeeping. It includes marketing: knowing your customer, communicating your value, and finding your market. It covers pricing strategy, which is one of the most persistent failure points for Ghanaian artisans who chronically undercharge for their labour and materials. It includes business planning, customer relations, costing and estimation, tax registration and the basics of business law relevant to small enterprises.

Beyond the technical content, Entrepreneurship Education builds something harder to quantify but equally important a commercial mindset. The habit of seeing your skill not just as a trade but as the foundation of a business. The instinct to think about return on investment, about growth, about scale. The confidence to negotiate rather than accept whatever a customer offers.

These are not abstract competencies. They are the difference between a TVET graduate who goes on to run a thriving automotive workshop and one who spends fifteen years as an underpaid employee or an underperforming self-employed artisan.

The Honest Case Against Keeping Social Studies

Proponents of keeping Social Studies in the TVET curriculum often make several arguments. Let us take them seriously.

The first is that Social Studies builds civic awareness and national identity, which every Ghanaian student needs regardless of career path. This is true. But TVET students are not removed from society. They have spent nine years in basic school studying Social Studies, Citizenship Education, and History. They have already received, by the time they arrive at a TVET institution, a foundational civic education. To continue delivering essentially the same content at the tertiary level is repetitive, not enriching.

The second argument is that Social Studies provides a broader perspective that makes students more rounded as individuals and citizens. Again, this has merit in a general education context. But TVET is not general education. It is purpose-specific. We do not make a pastry chef study abstract painting because it might broaden their perspective. We teach them pastry craft. The equivalent of broadening a TVET student's perspective is not more Social Studies it is teaching them how to operate as an economic actor in the world they are about to enter.

The third argument, raised sometimes by curriculum developers, is that removing Social Studies would reduce the academic content of the TVET programme and further stigmatize it as a non-academic pathway. This is a backwards argument. Stigma in TVET does not come from having less Social Studies. It comes from graduates who struggle financially after completing their training, from workshops that close within two years because the owner had no business management skills, from the persistent perception that TVET equips young people for employment but not for enterprise. Strengthening the entrepreneurship component would do more for the reputation of TVET than any number of Social Studies lessons.

Lessons from Within Africa and Beyond
Ghana does not need to look far for examples. Rwanda, in its ongoing effort to rebuild and economically empower its youth, integrated entrepreneurship and business skills into its TVET curriculum as a core rather than elective component years ago. The results in terms of graduate enterprise formation have been noted across the region. In Kenya, the TVET Authority redesigned its competency-based training programmes to embed financial literacy and business skills as non-negotiable elements of every vocational qualification.

Further afield, Germany's dual TVET system widely admired and frequently cited by Ghanaian education policymakers as a model does not leave business skills and commercial awareness to chance. Apprentices in Germany's Berufsschulen receive structured instruction in the commercial and legal dimensions of their trades as a formal part of their training. A German master carpenter knows not only how to join wood but how to quote a job, invoice a client, and manage a small workshop.

Ghana's TVET graduates deserve the same.
The Implementation Question
Replacing Social Studies with Entrepreneurship Education is not simply a matter of swapping one subject for another on a timetable. It requires careful curriculum development, trained educators who themselves understand small business realities, and materials that speak directly to the sectors TVET students work in. An entrepreneurship curriculum for auto technicians should include pricing and workshop management scenarios drawn from the automotive trade. One for catering students should address food business licensing, catering contract pricing, and hospitality enterprise management.

COTVET, the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service have the institutional capacity to drive this transition. Donor partners including GIZ, which has historically supported TVET development in Ghana — have shown interest in precisely this kind of curriculum reform. The Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA), which supports small business development, is a natural partner for both curriculum content development and post-graduation enterprise support.

What is missing is not capacity or partners. What is missing is the decisive policy commitment to say clearly that entrepreneurship is not supplementary to what TVET does. It is central to what TVET is supposed to do.

A Different Kind of Graduate
Picture two graduates of the same TVET electrical programme. Both can wire a building competently. Both passed their City and Guilds assessments. But the first went through a programme that included Social Studies: he can tell you about the regions of Ghana and the functions of the legislature, and he can articulate the causes of the Yaa Asantewaa War.

The second went through a programme that included Entrepreneurship Education: she can price an electrical installation job, write a professional quotation, register her business, open a basic savings and business account, track her income and expenses, build a client referral system, and begin thinking about taking on her first apprentice.

Both are valuable Ghanaians. But only one of them is equipped to do what the TVET system was built to help her do.

Ghana needs TVET graduates who can build businesses, create employment, and sustain themselves over a working lifetime. Social Studies will not give them that. Entrepreneurship Education will. The curriculum change is overdue and the argument for making it is, at this point, overwhelming.

By a TVET Education Advocate (Shelter K. Anloadey-HND and B. Tech in ICT)

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