Talents should be more beneficial than speaking English, Minister
Employment Minister offers advice to parents on talent discovery
The Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, Ignatius Baffour-Awuah, has bemoaned the preference for formal education over vocational or technical training in the country.
According to him, it is a contributor to the high rates of unemployment in the country.
He said that the focus of the Ghanaian education system on getting people to rattle the English language as against building them up in hands-on skills is problematic.
The minister was speaking on the floor of parliament on Tuesday, February 15, 2022, when he made the comments.
“If we want to tackle this issue of unemployment, what we have to look at are the educational systems that we practice in this nation. Many of us, when our children or wards return from school and they are able to speak the Queen’s language very well, we say that yes, my child is doing very well,” he said.
He expressed regret at the neglect for talents discovery, which he said could inure better to the welfare of the country than merely having a regular classroom education can offer.
“If the person is able to add one to two and get the result, we say that ah, this my son is very sharp. On the other hand, if that same person is able to use the foot to play football as against perhaps, rattling English, we’ll say that, that person is not good enough.
“Yet, if that footballer succeeds, the wealth that he will create for his family and himself will be sometimes even five times than if he was able to rattle English,” he said.
Ignatius Baffour-Awuah explained that it is for this reason that the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo government has refocused its attention on training people in the areas of vocational and technical skills because it is the future of work.
“So, what we need to do is to lay emphasis on vocational and technical education and for me, it is very refreshing that having lost the way all [those] years, Nana Addo’s government has drawn our attention to the need to go back to TVET,” he said.
Ignatius Baffour-Awuah is Minister of Employment and Labour Relations