Blame institutions for graduates’ unemployment in Ghana-Dr Fordjor

The growing rate of youth unemployment in Ghana should be blamed on poor training and ideologies fed trainees by the country’s universities, an American-based Ghanaian Surgeon has said.

This is to say that the current 68,000 unemployed graduates within the country were wrongly socialized by the institutions that churned them out.

According Dr Isaac Fordjor, most graduates did not prepare themselves for other opportunities of job creation. Instead, they held onto the mindset that they had to be served with jobs after school.

This, he believed, was a contributing factor to the high level of unemployment among the country’s youth.

He indicated that such a mindset had narrowed the thinking of graduates; hence their ability to develop fresh ideas in the areas of job creation was lost or non-existent.

He was sad that 250,000 of these youth entered the country’s job market annually.

He made these remarks at the 2015 edition of the Emerging Entrepreneurs Forum which was organized by the African Collegiate Entrepreneurs (ACEs) on theme, ‘Supporting Emerging Entrepreneurs for Accelerated National Development’.

The Surgeon further said graduates had over the years depended on Government to provide them with employment after school, an assumption he described as a mirage.

“I think it’s the mindset, it is how people think. If you gone to school for all these years and after getting the degree but all along you have been told that when you go to school you have been told that you have a job. Such a mindset must change because Government has not enough jobs for the youth,” he stressed.

He added that graduates had to think of how they could create jobs for themselves and for others rather than depending solely on the Government.

He called on the youth to embrace entrepreneurship and also be determined to surmount all challenges that would come their way.

Executive Director of the African Collegiate Entrepreneurs (ACEs), Owusu Karikari, has also advised that the State stop paying lip service to the reduction of graduate unemployment in the country.

He urged the Government and individuals to do more towards addressing youth unemployment which the country was currently grappling with.

The ACEs is also setting up incubation centers in all tertiary institutions across the country to groom graduates with practical skills in job creation opportunities with the aim of addressing graduate unemployment.