Policy Piece 001

 

The Degree That Doesn't Deliver.

Our Skills Gap Problem

Ghana produces graduates faster than its economy can absorb them.

The Issue

A World Bank policy note cited in recent reporting found that only 10 percent of Ghanaian graduates secure jobs within a year of leaving university (Asare, cited in Vaultz News, 2025). Ghana is not short of educated young people rather it is short of an education system that produces what the market actually needs. Add to this that roughly 1.9 million Ghanaian youth, most of them women, are neither in education, employment, nor training (Vaultz News, 2025), and the picture stops looking like a skills mismatch and starts looking like a structural failure.

The Ghana Statistical Service's own labour force bulletin confirms it from the other direction, "among people stuck in long-term unemployment (20 months or more) between 2022 and 2023, 22.3 percent held tertiary qualifications" (Graphic Online, 2024). A degree is supposed to shorten your job search, but for a meaningful share of Ghanaian graduates, it barely moves the needle.

Current State

The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), formed in 2020 under the Education Regulatory Bodies Act (Act 1023) from the merger of the old National Council for Tertiary Education and the National Accreditation Board, sits at the center of this problem. Its mandate covers accreditation, quality assurance, and monitoring institutional performance.

Internships already exist in most Ghanaian undergraduate programs, but the requirement is typically satisfied once, near the end if the degree, through a single placement

What it does not currently enforce is any binding ratio of practical to theoretical instruction in undergraduate business and arts programmes. Curricula stay heavy on lecture-based, theory-first delivery because nothing in the accreditation process forces otherwise. Universities are rewarded for compliance with academic form, not for whether their graduates can function in a workplace six months after convocation.

Analysts writing off the back of the World Bank's 2025 Policy Note on Ghana have flagged the same mismatch, an education system growing in enrollment but not in labour-market relevance, particularly for arts and business graduates competing against a shrinking pool of formal-sector jobs (Vaultz News, 2025).

The Policy Fix

GTEC should mandate a 60 percent practical / 40 percent theoretical curriculum split as a condition of accreditation for all undergraduate business and arts degree programmes. If a programme wants accreditation renewed, it needs at least 3 internships, applied projects, industry-supervised practicums, and case-based assessment making up the majority of contact hours and credit weighting, not an afterthought bolted onto a final-year elective.

It is catching up to what technical and vocational tracks already understand, skills that are market-responsive create their own opportunities, independent of government recruitment cycles (Vaultz News, 2025). Business and arts graduates deserve the same practical grounding that has made TVET and engineering pathways more resilient to Ghana's employment crunch.

The alternative is what we have now, a generation graduating with credentials that open doors to nowhere, and a Commission whose main enforcement muscle is aimed at institutional paperwork rather than graduate outcomes. GTEC was built to protect the integrity of Ghanaian qualifications.

A qualification that doesn't translate into employability has already lost its integrity.



Sources

  • Asare, K., cited in Vaultz News. (2025, September 30). Ghana's skills gap widens despite growth in secondary and tertiary education. https://thevaultznews.com/2025/09/30/ghanas-skills-gap-widens-despite-grow/

  • Graphic Online. (2024, February 21). Tertiary education graduates hit hard by unemployment. https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/tertiary-education-graduates-hit-hard-by-unemployment.html

  • Ghana Tertiary Education Commission. (n.d.). Our mandate. https://gtec.edu.gh/our-mandate

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