The Member of Parliament for Old Tafo, Vincent Ekow Assafuah, is appealing to the government to invest in young people to achieve the industrialization needed in the country.

The MP said: ‘’If we invest in our young people and provide them with the vital skills that are relevant in the 21st century industrialized society that we seek to build, we not only tackle our industrialization agenda but also our youth employment challenges.’’

He added that ‘’we, therefore, have a duty to treat this critical sub-sector with all the urgency that we can muster, because it is linked directly to the success or otherwise of the industrialized and modern country that we all yearn to see actualized.’’

Speaking on the floor of Parliament on the need to give more attention to Technical and Vocational Education & Training (TVET) in Ghana, the former Public Relations Officer of the Ministry of Education said: ‘’Our country has a lot of young people who are eager to work, but lack the requisite skills that are necessary to provide them with sustainable livelihoods to take care of themselves and their families’’

‘’If we ignore them, we will have a social implosion on our hands, for a restless, unemployed and unemployable youthful population is a recipe for disaster on so many levels, and it is actually a security threat. It cannot be tenable that people in this country have to import tilers from neighbouring countries, or that we have not trained enough young Ghanaian people to take up specialized skilled jobs in the oil sector, following the discovery of oil in commercial quantities in 2007,‘’ he added.

To him, the numerous interventions by the government to help TVET are welcoming.

‘’Government, in collaboration with the German government, has provided free apprenticeship training to over 13,000 Ghanaians since 2017 through the Ghana TVET Voucher project being implemented by COTVET. In addition to this, Free TVET is a key component of the Free Senior High School initiative of the government, and over 65,000 learners have so far benefitted from this in the various technical institutes under the Ministry of Education.’’