Jobs provide higher earnings and better benefits as a country grows, but they are also a driver of
development. Poverty falls as people work their way out of hardship, and improve on their lives.
Societies flourish as jobs bring people together from different ethnic and social settings and
provide alternatives to conflict. More so, sustained employment provides psychological, health
and social benefits to people. Jobs are therefore more than a byproduct of economic growth.
They are transformational-they are what we earn, what we do, and even who we are.
According to the ILO (2014)1
, the irregular economic recovery and successive downward
revisions in economic growth projections have had an impact on the global employment
situation. Almost 202 million people were unemployed in 2013 around the world, which is an
increase of almost 5 million compared with the previous year. This reflects the fact that
employment is not increasing fast enough to keep up with the growing labour force. Increase in
global unemployment is highest in the East Asia and South Asia regions, which together
represent more than 45% of additional jobseekers, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.
By contrast, Latin America added fewer than 50,000 additional unemployed to the global
number – or around 1% of the total increase in unemployment in 2013.
The ILO further reports that overall, the crisis-related global jobs gap that has opened up since
the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, over and above an already large number of
jobseekers, continues to widen. In 2013, this gap reached 62 million jobs, including 32 million
additional jobseekers, 23 million people that became discouraged and no longer look for jobs and 7 million economically inactive people that prefer not to participate in the labour market. In SubSaharan
Africa
Since the extraordinary increase in youth unemployment between 2008 and 2009, the global
youth unemployment rate has remained at very high levels. From 2009 to 2011 the youth unemployment
rate decreased from 12.7% to 12.3%. It increased again to 12.4% in 2012 and has
continued to grow to 12.6% in 2013. This is 1.1% points above the 2007 level of 11.5%. Global
youth unemployment is estimated to be 73.4 million in 2013, which is an increase of 3.5 million
since 2007 and 0.8 million above the 2011 level (ILO, 2013)2
. Overall, 40% of the global jobless
people are youth. However, out of the whole, a distinction is usually made between the educated
and uneducated. Generally, unemployment is highest among the educated youth as against the
uneducated (UNECA, 2010). For instance, in 2003, the unemployment rate was 8.5% for the
former and 6% for the latter group in Ghana.
High unemployment among the youth has become a major concern in recent times. Clearly, the
phenomenon is not peculiar to only developing countries, but it has become a global challenge
for many years bedeviling several or all the nations of the world, developed or developing. This
global phenomenon has become more pertinent since 2007 owing to the global economic crunch.
It is therefore important for more attention to be drawn towards addressing the challenge before
it further worsens, thus slowing down development of Ghana. Special attention must be paid to
the urban areas, especially the capital city since more youth are migrating to these areas because
of the impression that more opportunities exist over there.
This research seeks to elaborate on the youth unemployment challenge in Accra, the capital of
Ghana, from an economic perspective, how the youth is affected economically by the challenge,
NGOs’ efforts, governments’ past and present efforts to curbing the challenge and suggest
interventions to reduce it.