| dc.description.abstract | Unemployment and underemployment, particularly among the youth, are serious concerns to
governments across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Fifteen years on from the World Conference on
Education For All (EFA) in Jomtien, EFA policies have started to result in some of the largest
cohorts of primary school leavers ever witnessed in many parts of SSA. This is occurring at a
time when SSA’s formal sector is unable to generate sufficient formal employment and income
opportunities. The great majority of all school leavers, therefore, are obliged to enter the informal,
micro-enterprise economy, urban and rural, and receive informal training in traditional
apprenticeships and/or through other on-the-job means.
However the links between education, training and enterprise are still poorly understood. This
study presents an investigation into how young people construct and are able to navigate these
pathways to informal self-employment in rural Ghana by acquiring skills and schooling from
multiple sources, and through seeking assistance from informal networks. It makes a contribution
not only to understanding the transition from training to self-employment, but also to the nature
of the rural informal sector in Ghana.
This study examines three types of skills training provision; on-the-job apprenticeship training,
short-term modular training and longer-term pre-employment training, examining both the
delivery context of these different training modalities, as well as the graduates’ labour market
outcomes. The analysis is based on 12 months fieldwork in rural Ghana in 2004 and 2005 during
which time multiple approaches were used to uncover these skill-to-work pathways; tracer studies
with 162 vocational training graduates, semi-structured interviews with 160 apprentices and a
household survey capturing data on 147 youth. Furthermore, retrospective interviews with 114
enterprise owners were conducted to better understand pathways to informal self-employment
and the multiple occupational realities, or occupational pluralism, of many of those in this rural
African economy. This data suggests that the school-skill-enterprise relationship is highly
dependent on the delivery context of training as well as the type of enabling or disabling
environments within which the training is translated into employment outcomes.
This study also includes an analysis of the long history of Ghana’s skills development policies
and practice - up to 2006. This is integrated with a discussion on the wider environment within
which skills are delivered, particularly the labour market, and how this impacts on the
employment opportunities of technical and vocational education and training graduates in Ghana. | en |
