More educated Ghanaians cannot find work to do, although they are available to work, the Ghana 2023 Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has revealed.
Almost a quarter of persons, representing 22.3 percent, who experienced an unemployment spell for 21 months from January 2022 to September 2023 had completed tertiary education, while almost 48 percent of persons experiencing an unemployment spell had completed secondary education.
The AHIES is the country’s first nationally representative high-frequency household panel survey. The 2023 third-quarter survey provides quarterly information for seven quarters, from the first quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2023. The statistics were disaggregated by sex, type of locality, region and selected socio-demographic characteristics.
The government statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, made these disclosures during a presentation on the Ghana 2023 Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) in Accra on Thursday.
He said about 200,000 people experienced an unemployment spell for at least 12 months between the first quarter of 2022 and the third quarter of 2023. It was highest among females, representing 11,540 persons, 18,086 persons in urban areas, 9,987 with secondary education, and among persons between 15 and 24 years, 9,341.
Prof. Annim said the survey tracked people who had been unemployed for two quarters, that is, six months, between the second quarter and third quarter of 2023. It also tracked people who had been unemployed for nine months, from the first quarter of 2023 to the third quarter of 2023, as well as those who had been unemployed for 21 months, from the first quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2023.
Prof. Annim said youth unemployment, which was 1.3 million among people between the ages of 15 and 35 years, contributed to more than three-quarters of the total unemployment population of 1.85 million in the country. He said if the government was putting out any intervention, that was the population to target.
“Under the survey, the population that we need to think about in terms of youth employment is a figure around 1.3 million. This figure is an indication of a 14.6 percentage increase in the first three quarters of 2022 relative to the first three quarters of 2023,” Prof. Annim stressed that policymakers must direct their attention to that category of persons. “So if there was an initiative to employ 200,000 youth, the figures should give a sense of how long it was going to take the country to get rid of the 1.3 million youth unemployed population,” he stated.
Prof. Annim said there was a need to address unemployment issues differently across the administrative regions, especially in the Greater Accra and Ashanti regions, because they were the only two regions that consistently recorded unemployment rates higher than the national average during the seven quarters of the survey.
About 440,000 persons joined the labour force between the first quarter of 2023 and the third quarter of 2023, of which more than 240,000 persons, representing 60 percent, were employed during the period.
The Director of Research, Statistics and Information Management of the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations (MELR), George Amoah, said the government had depended on such statistics for planning.
He indicated that the ministry would consider how best to use the report for the benefit of the country, especially ensuring decent work for the populace.
