The establishment of departments of education in technical universities is part of government's five-year strategic plan for Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) reform programme. Prof Anamoah-Mensah gave the commendation on Tuesday, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on the side-line of a Youth Employment and Skills (YES) Stakeholder Engagement Platform Meeting in Accra.

The Yes programme was organised by the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET) with a particular focus on TVET and secondary education. It also focused on the levers through which youth unemployment could be reduced by enhancing skills development to help meet the future job needs of young people.

“At the moment even though we are trying to promote TVET, we have the UEW, Kumasi Campus, College of Technology Education, thus the only tertiary level that is training vocational and technical teachers,” Prof Anamoah-Mensah said.

“Then we have some colleges of education, which are also doing some training, but they are not training enough teachers.”He said the idea that technical universities would be given the opportunity to create education departments to train technical teachers was a laudable one.

He noted that this would enable more teachers to be trained for the TVET educational sector. He said many of the technical institutes in the country had teachers, who had the technical skills but lacked the technical education qualifications.

On the YES Stakeholder Engagement Platform Meeting, Prof Anamaoh-Mensah said it was a good thing because unemployment was a security risk; adding that “if we are able to bring it down, that would be very helpful. And TVET is one way of looking at it”.

He said graduates of the nation’s TVET institutions needed some form of support to be able to go into entrepreneurship.