It has observed that youth unemployment and underemployment persist in Ghana, largely due to a growing mismatch between the skills taught in schools and those demanded by the job market, particularly in areas of technical and vocational training.

According to the UNICEF, barriers like insuf­ficient technical and soft skills, limited access to training and literacy gaps, inadequate public and private sector partnership, gender inequality, and lack of career guidance – incentives to innovate, entrepreneurial skills, the white-collar centric education, etc, continue to hinder young people from securing meaningful employment.

The Country Representative of UNICEF, Osama Makkawi, who mentioned these indi­cated that addressing the challenges required a strong and well-structured Technical and Voca­tional Education Training (TVET) system that could deliver skills that young people needed to succeed.

He was speaking during the official launch of a ‘Draft Inception Report for the Skills Gap Analysis’ in the Ashanti Region’, yesterday at the Kumasi Technical Institute.

The findings presented in the report, which comes at a time when Ghana is determined to align its workforce with the demands of an ever-evolving global economy, offered a com­prehensive view of both the supply and demand sides of skills in the Ashanti Region.

It further identified skills mismatches, un­derutilised training opportunities and gaps in industry linkages as challenges to the delivery of quality technical and vocational education in the region.

Mr Makkawi observed that disparities between urban and rural TVET institutions, the challenge of soft skills development, the stigmatisation of TVET as a career path, capacity challenges among teachers regarding modern machinery, inclusivity gaps including gender stereotyping in TVET programmes, coordination and lack of structured partnerships with the private sector, needed to be addressed.

These challenges, he said, extended beyond the Ashanti Region, manifesting the broader challenges within the entire TVET sector, as he stressed the willingness of UNICEF to support Ghana.

Mr Richard Addo-Gyamfi, Ashanti Regional TVET Services Director, indicated that con­ducting a thorough analysis on the supply of skills offered by the TVET institutions and the demand from industry in the Ashanti Region, would gain invaluable insights into how “we can better prepare our learners for the challenges ahead in their careers and enhance their employ­ability”.

He noted that the report was not just about identifying gaps, “It is about creating pathways for sustainable employment, decent jobs and economic growth in our region”.

The project, he believed, would build the capaci­ties of principals and managers of TVET institutions to be able to iden­tify current and emerging skills from time-to-time in order to deliver a responsive and robust TVET sys­tem in the Ashanti Region.

According to Mr Gyamfi, Ashanti Region has been high­lighted as a hub of economic activity and a beacon of potential for industrial growth and youth empowerment, “yet the challenges identified—such as skills mismatches, underuti­lised training opportunities, and gaps in industry linkages—demand our immediate attention and action”.

The occasion coincided with the closing of a five-week capacity building training organised for selected facilitators on Computer Numeri­cal Control (CNC) which plays a crucial role in revolutionising the manufacturing process by enabling precision and efficiency that manual methods cannot achieve.