The 2026 budget’s announcement that Ghana will overhaul the basic school curriculum to equip learners with practical skills in electronics, robotics, coding, and artificial intelligence represents the kind of ambition that Ghana’s education discourse has historically lacked.
Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson’s commitment to establishing two new technical universities in Jasikan and Techiman, expanding six regional TVET centres of excellence, and supporting an additional 10,000 master craft persons through the Ghana TVET Voucher Project signals institutional recognition that Ghana’s development depends less on producing graduates than on producing employable citizens.
The question, however, is whether these reforms address the structural disconnect that has plagued Ghana’s technical and vocational education and training system for decades: the gap between what TVET institutions teach and what the labour market actually needs.
Ghana does not suffer from a shortage of TVET programmes. It suffers from a surplus of programmes that prepare students for jobs that do not exist, whilst neglecting sectors where employers cannot find adequately skilled workers. Without addressing this fundamental mismatch, expanding infrastructure and increasing enrolment will simply produce larger cohorts of unemployed graduates with certificates declaring competencies that industry does not recognise.
The numbers are instructive. The ratio of TVET students to senior high school students in Ghana stands at approximately 1:18, meaning that for every 18 students pursuing general secondary education, only one enters technical or vocational training.
This is not an accident. It reflects decades of social messaging, parental expectations, and institutional incentives that have positioned TVET as the fallback option for students who fail to excel academically rather than as a deliberate pathway to skilled employment and entrepreneurship. The stigma is real, persistent, and economically damaging.
Youth unemployment in Ghana reached 13.7 per cent in 2018 and has remained stubbornly high despite multiple rounds of TVET reform. Over 48 per cent of young people are either unemployed or underemployed, and many possess academic qualifications but lack the practical skills that employers require.
The paradox is stark: industries across construction, manufacturing, agro-processing, hospitality, and renewable energy consistently report that they cannot find adequately skilled workers, yet thousands of graduates emerge from training institutions each year unable to secure employment in those same sectors.
The problem is not volume. It is alignment. Ghana’s TVET system has historically operated on a supply-driven model, wherein institutions offer programmes based on available equipment, instructor capacity, and institutional inertia rather than based on systematic analysis of current and projected labour market demand.
A student can complete a three-year programme in a trade that has limited employment prospects, whilst high-demand sectors such as solar panel installation, precision agriculture technology, industrial automation, and pharmaceutical manufacturing struggle to recruit adequately trained personnel.
The government’s 2026 curriculum reforms represent a welcome shift towards future-oriented skills, but they must be implemented with clear-eyed recognition of Ghana’s current industrial reality. Teaching robotics and artificial intelligence to primary school students is aspirational, but it becomes meaningful only if there exists a pathway from that early exposure through secondary and tertiary technical education into actual employment in sectors that use those skills.
Without a deliberate industrial strategy that creates demand for AI specialists, robotics technicians, and advanced electronics workers, Ghana risks producing graduates whose skills outpace the economy’s capacity to absorb them.
The competency-based training model that the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training has championed since the mid-2010s represents the right conceptual framework. CBT emphasises outcomes rather than inputs, requiring students to demonstrate mastery of specific competencies that industry has validated as necessary for employment. The model is designed in partnership with leading employers, meaning that the skills taught should correspond directly to the skills employers need. In theory, this eliminates the alignment problem.
In practice, however, implementation has been inconsistent. The challenge is not the CBT concept itself but the institutional capacity to execute it at scale. Effective CBT requires that training institutions maintain equipment that mirrors what is used in industry, that instructors possess current practical experience in the trades they teach, and that assessment processes genuinely measure workplace competency rather than classroom recall.
In too many TVET institutions, equipment is outdated, instructors have limited recent industry experience, and assessment remains paper-based rather than performance-based.
The government’s commitment to constructing six regional TVET centres of excellence and establishing the University of Engineering and Agricultural Sciences with satellite campuses provides the physical infrastructure that Ghana’s system needs. But infrastructure alone does not guarantee quality.
The critical variable is whether these institutions will be resourced to maintain cutting-edge equipment, compensate instructors at levels that attract and retain industry practitioners, and establish sustained partnerships with employers who provide workplace learning opportunities and validate curriculum relevance.
The apprenticeship question deserves particular attention. Ghana’s informal sector employs over 90 per cent of the working population, and traditional apprenticeship remains the dominant pathway through which young people acquire trade skills.
The National Apprenticeship Programme aims to formalise and improve these arrangements, but its reach remains limited relative to the scale of informal training occurring across the country. The challenge is that informal apprenticeship, whilst often effective at teaching practical skills, lacks standardised quality assurance, portable credentials, and pathways for skills upgrading.
A genuinely transformative TVET reform would create bridges between informal apprenticeship and formal credentialing systems, allowing master craftspeople who have trained hundreds of apprentices through traditional arrangements to have their competencies formally recognised and their training programmes quality-assured.
This means establishing Recognition of Prior Learning mechanisms that allow experienced practitioners without formal certificates to demonstrate competency and receive credentials that employers and licensing bodies accept. Ghana has piloted such schemes, but scaling them requires institutional investment and political will that have historically been inconsistent.
The gender dimensions of TVET participation cannot be ignored. Girls remain severely underrepresented in STEM-oriented technical programmes, and the government’s commitment to establishing ICT laboratories in ten girls’ schools across regions is a step towards addressing this imbalance.
However, laboratory equipment alone does not dismantle the social norms, career guidance gaps, and economic barriers that discourage girls from pursuing technical careers. Effective intervention requires sustained engagement with parents, communities, and employers to demonstrate that technical professions offer viable, respectable, and remunerative career pathways for young women.
The elephant in the room is employment absorption capacity. TVET does not create jobs. It prepares people for jobs that must exist in the economy. Ghana’s industrial base remains narrow, export-oriented sectors are dominated by raw material extraction, and manufacturing accounts for a minimal share of GDP. Without a concurrent industrial policy that deliberately expands sectors requiring skilled technical workers, scaling TVET enrolment simply produces larger pools of unemployed graduates.
This means that TVET reform cannot succeed in isolation from broader economic strategy. The government must identify priority sectors where Ghana possesses a comparative advantage or strategic necessity—agribusiness, renewable energy, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, ICT services, tourism infrastructure—and then align TVET programme offerings with the specific skill requirements of those sectors.
This requires labour market information systems that systematically track employer demand, skills gaps, and emerging occupational requirements, feeding that information back to training institutions on a continuous basis.
The examples exist. Germany’s dual education system, which integrates classroom instruction with extensive workplace apprenticeship, produces employment rates for vocational graduates that exceed those of many university programmes.
Switzerland’s vocational education pathways command social prestige equivalent to academic routes precisely because they demonstrably lead to stable, well-compensated employment. South Korea transformed its technical education system in the 1970s and 1980s by tightly linking training programmes to the skill requirements of priority export industries, ensuring that graduates entered a labour market actively seeking their competencies.
Ghana does not replicate these models wholesale, but it must learn their core lesson: TVET succeeds when it is designed backwards from employment outcomes rather than forwards from institutional capacity.
This means that curriculum development should begin with employer consultations that identify required competencies, that programme approvals should require demonstrated employer demand for graduates, and that institutional funding should be partially tied to graduate employment rates in relevant occupations within twelve months of completion.
The University of Engineering and Agricultural Sciences presents a particular opportunity if it is structured correctly. Ghana’s agricultural sector remains the largest employer but suffers from low productivity, limited mechanisation, and minimal value addition.
An engineering and agricultural sciences institution that focuses specifically on developing appropriate technologies for Ghanaian farming systems, training agricultural engineers who understand local soil conditions and cropping patterns, and supporting agro-processing enterprises through technical assistance could materially transform agricultural productivity. But this requires that the institution be designed from inception around solving Ghana’s agricultural challenges rather than replicating generic curricula imported from contexts with entirely different agricultural systems.
The commitment to supporting 10,000 additional master craft persons and apprentices through the Ghana TVET Voucher Project is valuable, but it must be monitored for outcomes rather than merely enrolment. Voucher systems work when they create genuine choice amongst quality providers competing on employment outcomes.
They fail when they simply subsidise existing programmes regardless of quality or labour market relevance. Rigorous evaluation tracking employment and earnings outcomes for voucher recipients, compared against control groups, is essential to determine whether the programme achieves its objectives or merely expands access to ineffective training.
What Ghana requires is not more TVET. It requires better TVET, tightly coupled with labour market demand and continuously updated to reflect technological change and evolving employer requirements. The infrastructure investments announced in the 2026 budget create the physical foundation for such a system. Whether that foundation supports genuine transformation or simply larger-scale replication of existing inadequacies depends on the execution choices made in curriculum design, instructor recruitment, employer engagement, and quality assurance over the coming years.
The measure of success is not how many students enrol in TVET programmes or how many certificates are awarded. It is how many graduates secure employment in occupations matching their training, earn incomes that justify the time and cost invested in skill acquisition, and contribute productively to sectors that Ghana’s economy needs to grow. Without obsessive focus on those outcome measures, Ghana risks celebrating expanded access to training that does not deliver on its promise of employment and economic mobility.
The opportunity is real. Ghana’s demographic dividend—a young population that could drive productivity growth for decades—depends on converting that youth bulge into a skilled workforce rather than an unemployed burden. The institutional framework, Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, the Ghana TVET Service, development partner support from organisations including the World Bank, DANIDA, and GIZ, exists to coordinate reform. The political commitment, reflected in budget allocations and ministerial statements, appears genuine.
What remains is execution. The 2026 curriculum reforms, the new technical universities, the TVET centres of excellence, and the expanded apprenticeship support will succeed or fail based on whether they produce graduates whom employers actively seek to hire. That is the only metric that ultimately matters. Everything else is input accounting.
***
About the author: Dominic Senayah
Dominic Senayah is an International Relations professional and policy analyst based in England, specialising in African political economy, humanitarian governance, and migration diplomacy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the UK and writes on trade policy, institutional reform, and Ghana–UK relations for audiences across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the wider Global South.
DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
Source: www.myjoyonline.com
