The Chief Executive Officer of Northshore Apparel Ghana Limited, Alhaji Nurideen Mohammed, has highlighted a growing challenge in Ghana’s job market: many young people are willing to work but do not have the practical skills needed to secure and keep jobs.
Speaking at the opening of the company’s garment manufacturing facility in Savelugu in the Northern Region, Mr Mohammed said Northshore’s recruitment exercise exposed a significant gap between the willingness of young people to work and their readiness for industrial employment.
More than 20,000 young people applied when the company opened recruitment, he said, but many lacked the basic operational skills required on an export-oriented apparel production floor.
“That was the day we understood that our youth are not merely unemployed. They are unemployable.”
The statement is striking, but the experience behind it points to a problem that goes beyond the language used to describe young jobseekers. A young person can be willing to work and still be unable to secure employment when the education and training system has not equipped them with the skills required by businesses.
Mr Mohammed said the company therefore expanded its pre-employment training programme with support from Ghana EXIM Bank, the Youth Employment Agency and the National Youth Authority. About 2,000 young people have since been trained and placed in permanent employment, according to the CEO.
That outcome raises an important question for Ghana’s employment policy: if thousands of young people can become productive workers after relatively short, targeted training, why should the country continue to treat unemployment and skills development as largely separate problems?
Mohammed said Northshore’s experience showed that the transition from lacking employable skills to becoming a productive worker could be achieved within a short period.
“The distance between an unemployable young person and a taxpaying professional is not a generation. It is a training bench and about 12 weeks.”
Ghana does not only need to create more jobs; it needs to ensure that the people expected to fill those jobs are prepared for them. This requires a stronger connection between education, technical and vocational training and the actual requirements of industry.
Ghana Statistical Service data showed that unemployment among people aged 15 to 35 averaged 21.9% during the first three quarters of 2025, while nearly two million young people were not in employment, education or training.
Yet unemployment figures alone do not fully capture the problem. A labour market can have vacancies while young people remain unemployed if there is a persistent mismatch between the skills available and those demanded by employers. Businesses then struggle to recruit, while jobseekers continue to wait for opportunities they are not adequately prepared to take.
This is where Ghana’s skills-development strategy needs greater emphasis. Training programmes should be designed with employers, not simply for employers, with greater attention to practical competencies, apprenticeships and workplace-based learning.
Northshore’s experience offers a useful example. The company did not simply reject applicants who lacked the required skills; it trained them and moved them into permanent employment. That model cannot solve Ghana’s youth unemployment problem on its own, but it demonstrates that skills gaps are not necessarily permanent barriers.
The broader challenge is to expand such pathways at scale. Reducing youth unemployment and supporting industrial growth will require greater focus not only on the number of jobs created, but also on ensuring that young people have the skills and competencies required to fill them.
