UNCERTAIN ALLEGIANCE…

A couple of weeks ago I found myself one evening in a coffee shop with a young graduate of the Regional Maritime University. I sat drinking coffee with this 25-year-old young man called Augustine (not his real name) and his sixty-two-year-old father, a retired seaman, at a lightless coffee shop within the junction mall complex in downtown Accra.

I had met Augustine two years earlier when he undertook his mandatory one-year national service with an organisation I worked with. Today, I was meeting with him and his dad because they were somehow convinced, I could help him get a job with my organisation though I have no such power. I sat quietly, watching, and listening to the old man recount how easy it was to get a job within the port enclave in his youthful days. My eyes became misty as I listened to him recount the stories nostalgically.

The story of Augustine unfortunately is far too pervasive in our society today. Indeed, a new National Security Strategy report released a couple of months ago identified youth unemployment as one of the major domestic threats which if left not tackled will plunge the nation into a civil disturbance. According to the World Bank, Ghana is faced with 12% youth unemployment and more than 50% underemployment, both higher than overall unemployment rates in Sub-Saharan African countries. The question I have been grappling with is what can be done about this situation from the perspective of policymakers, students, and parents.

Are our young people prepared for the future of work?  How do we break the cycle of a generation that graduate from school with no employable skills or an entrepreneurship mindset? The culture of young graduates coming out of school and depending on the state for public sector jobs must be replaced by a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Though I understand the nostalgia of people like Augustine’s father, the truth is I could not reconcile myself to the sentiment he expressed. The truth is the nature of work in our times is radically changing and what used to work a generation ago isn’t sustainable now. Most jobs are under the onslaught of the ever-expanding power of artificial intelligence. Though there is understandable anxiety about the future of work in relation to artificial intelligence, the opportunities offered by this technological progress is enormous enough for our young people to tap into.

How are we preparing for the profound changes being wrought by technology? For most of our parent’s generation, they could be assured that the jobs they entered after school were going to be the field in which to build a fulfilling career if one so wished. The knowledge that one could come out of university, teacher or nursing training college with public-sector jobs waiting are largely over. The challenge of fiscal impediments and technology means most of the ‘easy opportunities’ that were available to the generation before ours isn’t simply available anymore.

The jobs of the future are going to be heavily reliant on AI and it behoves all of us to prepare our young people for that. That future is here with us now and we must embrace the radical changes. How are we preparing our young students to face the future of ‘technological unemployment’ amid fiscal constraints faced by many African governments? How many of our high school students are learning to code now? These are questions that must engage the minds of the policymakers within the education system.

The evolving nature of artificial intelligence and the state of development of most African nations including Ghana means the middle-class jobs that propelled millions to prosperity in the developed world won’t be available for Africans of our generation. Even the well paid, high-security public sector jobs of yesterday are going to give way to low wage, low-security jobs with no real prospects for economic empowerment.

Many young Ghanaians are grappling with the sad realization that their government has a limited fiscal ability to employ the hundreds of thousands of young people coming out of school every year. How are they going to respond to this?

Whereas the labour-intensive jobs of the generation of Augustine’s father are not ever going to come back, the technological advances that are displacing some of these low-skilled jobs are also providing enormous opportunities in other sectors? How is our education system going to respond to that? How do we minimize the impact of these changes whilst still keeping our social cohesion intact?

My undergraduate friend, David, who is an expert in this field holds a rather pessimistic view about the future of work as ‘technology develops’ in Ghana. He suggests that with technology will come innovation which will open up new employment possibilities. But he envisions more job losses than the creation of jobs in the short-term due to the educational level/standards of most Ghanaians.

So, what is the new kind of education or retraining we must provide in the age in which we are entering now? What are the new skill sets required for the new economy? As we transition to a new world of work that is hugely driven by technology and artificial intelligence from our traditional skills-based jobs, the question of the role to be played by technical and vocational education and training cannot be overemphasized. How can we realign TVET to respond to the needs of the new digital economy? I would leave you to ponder on the answers.