Vocational and technical need more attention (9/2/9)

Story: Jennifer Dornoo & Gifty Bamfo

THE Director for Organisations and Programmes of the National Youth Council, Mr Etsibah Mensah, has called on the government to pay more attention to vocational and technical skills education in the country.
“This would assist the youth in acquiring appropriate technical and vocational skills in the nation’s quest to becoming a middle-level income country,” he said.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic, Mr Mensah said the greatest challenge of the youth who had acquired technical and vocational skills was the competition they faced with their products in the face of cheaper products from foreign countries.
“Most Ghanaians today prefer to buy cheap second-hand clothes to locally made tie and dye shirts hanging in a shop,” he stated.
He stressed the need for the youth to be re-oriented in producing and consuming locally manufactured goods.
Mr Mensah said this would promote the Ghanaian economy, which had become liberalised as a result of the low patronage of locally manufactured goods.
He said the youth had to learn how to appreciate things that had been produced locally to boost youth employment in the vocational and technical sector of the country and further strengthen the economy.
He said there was the need for the government to invest in the youth who had acquired various skills by making micro credits accessible to them to help them to produce in large quantities and make their products cheap and affordable to Ghanaians.
Mr Mensah said the current educational system in the country did not favour the society, since the “classroom education” did not have any impact on the Ghanaian society.
He said formal education made students “aliens in their own society” and rather made them feel part of the Western world, since the knowledge they acquired did not have any reflection on who they really were.