Unprecedented youth unemployment detaching young people from society

During announcement time last Sunday at church service, the steward jokingly explained that young people say marriage is complex and they want to make it simple. The congregation laughed it off. This was in connection with the tenth year anniversary celebration of the youth fellowship. One of the programmes planned is on the topic 'let us make marriage simple'. The implied import here is that marriage is gradually becoming a very scarce commodity. Many young people in the church desire to stay chaste until marriage but the there for true marriage is not there. The question is why? The answer is not far fetched. Unemployment among young people is rendering powerless from assuming the full place in society including marriage that forms the basis of the family which is the basic unit of the society. What will become of society in the near future if they aren't able to settle down to family? 

Açucena is a 26-year old graduate trained as a professional veterinarian from a Western European country currently receiving bail out from the Brent Wood institutions and the European Central Bank. The conditionalities for their assistance include slashing salaries of government workers, freezing public employment and increasing taxes. Since graduation, Açucena  has never secured a job for which she was trained in. She had to settle for lesser skill and pay temporary contract jobs as a shop assistant. Duration for each of them was seven months. Currently, she is at home unemployed. Like many young people in her country, she is considering emigration as her final option.

Latest International Labour Organisation (ILO) Global Employment Trends for Youth report reveals that the true picture of youth unemployment is even more pessimistic. Almost 13% of young people worldwide are out of work, and their situation is unlikely to improve for four years. Almost 13% of people aged between 15 and 24 - or almost 75 million - have no work, although this is slightly down on its peak in 2009. As a result, it says many young people are extending their time in higher education because they cannot find jobs. Many skilled young people are being forced into part-time and unskilled work because they cannot find work in the fields they trained for.The ILO says that more than six million young people worldwide have given up looking for work and are becomingly increasingly detached from society. By not using their skills they are losing them, the report says, and if there is no improvement in the jobs market soon, they may be not only unemployed, but unemployable.

We are losing valuable resources through waste. For use in Ghana, our problem is compounded by lack of political will to tackle the problem of youth unemployment head on. Indeed the OIL report warns of a "crisis" with more than six million people so disillusioned they have given up looking for work.The trumpeted programmes are nothing more than comic relief. The danger for us in Ghana however is very gloomy than many perceive it. The April 24 to May 10 2012 latest opinion survey in Ghana by research outfit Synovate ranked health, employment, education and economy in that order as the top issues on which Ghanaians will cast their votes on December 2012. Politics scored a paltry 1 percent and firmly rooted in the bottom of the list of issues that are of important to those polled in the survey. Thus the issue of unemployment ranks second to health for all Ghanaians of voting age. I am sure if this research was limited solely to the youth, the ranking would have been different as young people usually have the best immune system hence health will not top their priorities. The youth are very volatile group but also vulnerable to political manipulation and considering the prevalence of violence in the neighbourhood, of West of Africa, one cannot help but get anxious about the effects of high youth unemployment in Ghana. It is for these and other salient reasons that government and all stakeholders must view the high rate of youth unemployment as present danger.

The youth unemployment crisis can be beaten but only if job creation for young people becomes a key priority in policymaking and private sector investment picks up significantly.The ILO wants governments to make job creation a priority. It wants more training schemes, and also tax breaks for employers.The ILO suggests offering tax breaks and other incentives to businesses hiring young people and offering more entrepreneurship programmes to help kick-start careers. This apparently should be a good suggestion for young people in Ghana after all the sitting president of Ghana, John Atta Mills has a PhD in taxation hence can appraise himself of the suggestion. Hopefully, he will for once bring his professional training to bear for the benefit of the future leaders to halt the youth from detaching themselves from mainstream society.