The Vocational Training for Females (VTF), a Non-Governmental Organisation promoting Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), has called on youths in the Upper-Manya Krobo District to choose TVET as a career to reduce the unemployment rate.
In collaboration with the Upper-Manya Krobo Municipal Education Directorate, VTF sensitised more than 2,000 parents, junior high school (JHS) pupils and teachers on the relevance of TVET and the many job opportunities it could offer.
The intervention was to ensure that JHS pupils who were about to choose their senior high schools were guided and given the options in TVET to enroll in those institutions. Mr Lawrence Offei, the Advocacy Officer of VTF, said the unemployment rate in Ghana had risen despite various interventions by the Government to provide jobs.
He said there were several job opportunities in the mining and manufacturing sectors requiring skilled personnel but these were lacking because most of the youth shunned technical and vocational training, which would have provided them the requisite skills.
He said studies have shown that many parents preferred their children to read courses that would enable them to do white-collar jobs than to pursue technical and vocational training programmes, even if the children were passionate about TVET.
Mr Offei said, on the contrary, TVET was the best option to ending unemployment and lead the country to prosperity adding that Germany, Singapore, China and Canada were epitomes of countries whose development backbone was TVET.
He noted that research had shown that parents and teachers, to a large extent, influenced the career choices of their pupils and children respectively, and appealed to them to encourage children with TVET potentials to pursue those courses.
Ms Felicity Adarkwah, the Guidance and Counselling Coordinator of the Ghana Education Service (GES), expressed gratitude to VTF for the sensitisation and expressed the hope that all the education circuits in the remote areas would benefit from the programme.
Most of the parents the Ghana News Agency spoke with expressed satisfaction with the programme, which, they said, had erased some misconceptions about TVET that one could not progress to the universities through technical and vocational training.