Ghana’s two past decades have been marked by steady economic progress, which has transformed the country into a lower-middle-income economy, accompanied by a decline in poverty, increases in incomes for families, improvements in health, and expanded educational opportunities.
The Country Director for Ghana of World Bank, Henry Kerali and Senior Director, Education Global Practice at the World Bank, Jaime Saavedra Chanduvi said this in a forward of World Bank’s new report titled ‘Stepping Up Skills in Urban Ghana’.
“As Ghana looks forward to a future of economic growth, it needs to regain growth from the 2016 slowdown, including improving competitiveness and economic diversification and raising labor productivity”, they stated.
The report which will be launched in Accra this evening noted: “A well-equipped workforce will be key to obtaining these goals. The Government of Ghana and its development partners such as the World Bank have long recognized the importance of investments in human capital”.
It added that insufficient skills in young people would be an obstacle to improving competitiveness in all sectors across the economy, be they informal or formal, in traditional sectors or in the modern areas such as information and telecommunications technologies.
An agenda for improving skills in the workforce relies on being able to identify where the more practical and profitable investments in the current skills profile should be made.
To that end, Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) is an innovative tool used across the world to assess the education, cognitive, work-related, and socio-emotional skills stock in a population, as well as the impact of these traits on employment and earnings.
Ghana is among the first two countries (along with Kenya) in Sub-Saharan Africa where this systematic assessment of skills has been carried out. The evidence collected through this assessment shows that the multidimensional nature of skills requires nurturing from early childhood education to school and university systems, as well as through school-based and on-the-job training, according to researchers of the report.
This broad concept of skills has a significant impact both on jobs and on earnings, and the relationship is also mutual: jobs attract and reward skills. The information from the Stepping Up Skills in Urban Ghana study provides detailed insights for policy makers.
These insights cover areas including investments in early childhood education, the role of improvements in the quality of education, and the creation of incentives for economic actors to invest in on-the-job training to improve Ghana’s competitiveness and the well-being of its citizens.
Nevertheless, a significant economic dividend is implicit in Ghana’s increasingly abundant urban labor force. If current and future generations of workers can be empowered to realize their potential in a vibrant and increasingly competitive economy, the prospect of sustained poverty reduction, further economic development, and the reaping of benefits associated with a demographic transition could profoundly reshape Ghana’s society and economy for future generations.
Equipping current and future generations of workers with the skills they need to improve their livelihoods and to drive increases in national productivity and competitiveness requires that these workers have skills appropriately aligned with the needs of a growing economy.
Some skills are innate, arbitrarily assigned through the accident of birth. Other skills are acquired through education, work, and life experience. The primary means through which a government can develop the skills of its labor force is through policies and strategies implemented through the education system.
Jobs form the foundation of economic development, rising living standards, increases in productivity, and improved social cohesion.
Equipping people with appropriate skills to access meaningful work constitutes the means for achieving these objectives. This report, premised on the Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) framework, considers education the instrument for learning and acquiring skills and the key for accessing employment.
Although the Ghanaian government has made significant progress in expanding access to basic education, many challenges persist in the education sector.
These include the low quality of learning in both basic and post-basic education, inequity of access, and the limited capacity of the education system to equip beneficiaries with skills aligned with increasing competitiveness and productivity in the economy. If education and training institutions are unable to provide the skills demanded by the market, economic inefficiencies could be compounded. Skills development strategies can be effective only if they are appropriately calibrated to the needs of the economy and only if they take into account the current skills endowment of the existing labor force.
The most effective skills development strategies are informed by evidence, and effective implementation requires the ongoing collection of data to gauge shifting demand for skills and the changing character of the labor force and economy at large.
To date, evidence regarding the stock of existing skills in Ghana’s labor force is relatively underdeveloped. The precise measurement of the prevalence of different categories of skills within the population is required for the effective design of policy interventions that target improved training to reduce skill gaps aligned with the needs of specific sectors, improvement in productivity, and increased employability of workers.
Survey
With the data it gathers, the first STEP household survey aims, in part, to address this deficiency through a rigorous analysis of the skills endowment of urban Ghanaian adults.
The STEP survey was carried out between September 2011 and December 2013 in Ghana, as part of the first wave of surveys initiated under the STEP Skills Measurement Program.
The Ghanaian sample consists of about 3,000 individuals between 15 and 64 years of age, living in urban areas across 71 districts. In addition to standardized information captured at the household level, the STEP survey collects information regarding the level of skill, level of education completed, and work history.
On skills, the STEP survey includes information about (i) self-reported cognitive skills (that is, a subjective assessment of an individual’s use of foundation skills—reading, writing, and numeracy— at work and in daily life); (ii) assessed cognitive skills (that is, an objective assessment of reading literacy based on the International Adult Literacy Survey); (iii) socioemotional skills (that is, personality traits, behavior, and risk and time preferences); and (iv) job-specific skills (that is, an indirect assessment of skills used at work). The STEP framework is structured according to five iterative steps and associated objectives: (i) getting children off to the right start; (ii) ensuring that all students learn; (iii) building job-relevant skills; (iv) encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation; and (v) facilitating labor mobility and job matching.
Ultimately, if these five steps are achieved, Ghana will significantly advance the likelihood of realizing the potential of its labor force, with considerable positive implications for the livelihoods of its people, poverty reduction, improved productivity, economic development, and the betterment of society at large.
Objectives This report is intended to complement and support the work of the Government of Ghana as it seeks to accelerate progress toward the achievement of the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the work of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) in advancing the reforms envisaged by the Education Strategic Plan (ESP) for 2010–20.
Background
Ghana stands at the cusp of extraordinary opportunity. Since the country’s return to democratic rule and the advent of the Fourth Republic, per capita gross domestic product (GDP, current US$, PPP [purchasing power parity]) has increased almost fourfold, from US$375 in 1993 to US$1,442 in 2014. In 2011, Ghana was the only African economy to demonstrate double-digit economic growth, surpassing 14 percent that year. In the aftermath of the Chinese economic slowdown and the slump in global commodities markets, Ghana’s growth tempered to 4 percent in 2014 but is expected to recover above 8 percent in the medium term as the country begins exploiting significant oil and gas resources.
Throughout the period of the Fourth Republic, fertility rates have remained relatively high, falling from 5.3 births per female in 1993 to 4.2 in 2014. Concurrently, the proportion of children under the age of 15 in the total population declined only marginally from 43 percent in 1993 to 39 percent in 2014. As a consequence, Ghana’s labor force has grown rapidly, from approximately 6.5 million in 1993 to 11.3 million in 2014, and is expected to continue to grow in the coming decades. Population growth has also contributed to an erosion of the effects of buoyant economic growth on poverty reduction. Although the country has made progress in reducing poverty—with the proportion of the population living below the government’s poverty line falling from 32 percent in 2005 to 24 percent in 2012—stubborn disparities persist with regard to access to economic, social, and political opportunities.
Inequity is particularly evident in the differences between the populations of the poorer northern Savannah regions and the rest of the country. In the three northernmost administrative regions of the country, more than half, or 58 percent, of the population falls below the poverty line, compared to 19 percent in the seven administrative districts of the south of the country.
The spatial distribution of poverty and economic opportunity, in turn, has led to significant migration from north to south, and a swelling of the ranks of the urban labor force.
African Eye Report
