TVET Skills Drive Targets Ghana’s Jobs and Productivity Gap

 

A stronger pool of technically skilled workers could help Ghanaian businesses reduce production delays, maintain machinery, improve efficiency and create more opportunities for young people, as industry struggles to find workers with practical skills.

It is against this backdrop that Skills for Progress Africa (SFPA) has launched a fellowship programme that seeks to connect technical education with the needs of businesses.

The programme has started with 10 Fellows and has a long-term target of reaching 10,000, creating a larger pool of young technical professionals who can move from the classroom into productive work.

For factories, engineering firms, construction companies and other businesses that depend on technical skills, the availability of workers who can diagnose faults, operate equipment and solve problems can directly affect production and operating costs.

Executive Director of SFPA, Kwame Nyatuame, said the fellowship was created to address the gap between technical education and workplace competence.

“Education without experience is incomplete, and talent without opportunity is a tragedy,” he said.

The programme was launched in Accra under the theme, “Building the Workforce That Will Build Africa,” with industry leaders, TVET practitioners, policymakers and development-sector representatives discussing how Ghana can better prepare young people for work.

From training to productive work

Managing Director of ELAF Industrial Automation Limited, Solomon Bekoe, said the challenge facing Ghana was not only the number of young people entering technical education but also the difficulty many face in moving from training into productive employment.

He said enrolment in pre-tertiary TVET programmes had increased by almost 130 per cent over seven years, while youth unemployment among people aged 15 to 24 in Greater Accra reached 49.3 per cent in the third quarter of 2025.

“We don’t have an unemployment problem. We have a connection problem,” Mr Bekoe said.

He explained that when a company cannot find a young technician capable of identifying and fixing a technical fault, the business loses productivity. At the same time, a graduate who cannot demonstrate those practical skills struggles to find work.

That gap is particularly important for Ghanaian businesses seeking to expand production and adopt more technology, where equipment downtime and a shortage of skilled workers can increase operating costs.

As the fellowship’s founding technical partner, ELAF will provide practical training in industrial automation, combining digital learning, AI-supported simulation and hands-on experience through the Festo LX platform.

Mr Bekoe also urged companies hosting Fellows to give them real workplace problems to solve instead of limiting them to observation.

Skills that improve productivity

Managing Director of Niche Cocoa, Lloyd Ashley, said technical workers must also understand how their skills affect the wider performance of a business.

He encouraged the Fellows to focus on reducing downtime, simplifying processes and using data and automation to improve efficiency rather than measuring productivity simply by the number of hours worked.

He also stressed the importance of an engineering culture in which workers report problems, ask questions, share knowledge and help younger colleagues develop.

Building a larger workforce

SFPA intends to use the experience of the first 10 Fellows to refine the programme before expanding it to 100 Fellows, 1,000 and eventually 10,000.

The fellowship combines technical training with workplace exposure, mentorship and personal and professional development.

For Ghana, the organisers say the larger objective is to create a workforce capable of supporting businesses as they adopt new technologies and expand production.

For young people entering TVET, it also offers a route to gain practical experience and improve their chances of securing employment or building their own businesses.

The success of the programme will ultimately depend on how effectively the training translates into jobs, higher productivity and better performance for the businesses that employ the graduates.