Ghana’s Minister of Business Development, Dr Ibrahim Mohammed Awal, has revealed that only 2 percent of Senior High School (SHS) students in the country want to be entrepreneurs after school.
Speaking at the launch of Graphic Business Tertiary Business Sense Challenge, Dr Awal described this development as worrying since this is in sharp contrast with what pertained in developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom where the majority of the youth ventured into self-built enterprises after school.
“Only last year the ministry launched the Student Entrepreneurship Initiative (SEI) in second-cycle institutions across the country and we conducted a research to find out how entrepreneurial our young people were. But we realised that only two percent of young people in SHSs wanted to do business, while 68 percent wanted to work for the government,” he said.
“This contrasts sharply with what pertains elsewhere. In the US, 72 percent of young people in colleges want to be business people, while in the UK it is over 58 percent,” he added.
Meanwhile, Dr Awal added that about 120,000 students who graduated from the various universities in Ghana yearly were interested in public sector jobs. However, the government could employ only 10,000 out of that number.
He explained that this situation requires students to develop entrepreneurial skills.
Most university graduates in Ghana want to work as public servants because they believe their job is secured in the sector as compared to the private sector.
Others also believe a regular income is also much better than entrepreneurship where they may not have that.
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