A section of business minded leaders have questioned why student jobs as well as casual employment for young people do not exist in our country today unlike our Western and Asian counterparts. In fact, this is reasonable concern that the country including everyone must contribute to addressing it.
Apart from harnessing energies built up in our youth for the growth of the economy, student jobs also provide opportunities for students to earn income to complement support from parents as well us getting the requisite working experiences to catapult them to bigger responsibilities at work places after graduation and in full employment status.

The students gain confidence at work, build network with colleague workers and business owners, and at the same time become efficient with time management while at school or home.

The question has always been: Which kind of jobs are available to attract and recruit student workers? Indeed the jobs may vary across various continents and economies, but every country has priority areas around which jobs are created for the people.

We may not see much of job vacancies in our supermarkets, malls, cleaning services, factories etc as in Europe or America, but in Ghana the agricultural sector, from the farm, to harvesting, transportation, sales and distribution, processing and preservation, and exports are our hallmarks with competitive advantage over many nations on the globe.
So why have students stopped working on farms (both animals and crops), getting involved with harvesting of food and transportation, participating in food sales, distribution and processing to earn an income or to help contribute to income generation of their families? Agriculture is the area where Ghana identifies its maximum strength to compete with other nations like

The Netherlands, USA, Brazil and Ukraine for food production and exports. Every aspect of our educational system must therefore direct its attention to agricultural sector to help utilize the untapped potential of this sector. It must be realized that in today’s post-COVID19 era, the nation with food, not gold or machines, is the wealthiest.

Growing up, and at school, many of us took farming work seriously and worked alongside our parents. Managing cocoa farms, food crops and animals, sale of food produce, etc were regular duties assigned to us although as students. Some earned direct incomes to support their education or contributed to the overall family income being managed by their parents. I later realized that this is similar to what pertains in most advanced countries where students and the youth take up part-time jobs on farms, supermarkets, cleaning companies and others. In fact, almost all Ghanaian students abroad perform these extra-duties to support their education and to remit their families back home.

I remember studying in the Netherlands in the early 2000, my four-hour part-time cleaning and farm jobs enabled me put up a house back in Ghana.
This was aside what I could send to support my family and dependants in Ghana and elsewhere. Why is the Ghanaian student today so financially dependent on families, and not urgently seeking to work like their counterparts elsewhere? I do recall how students refused to take up laboratory cleaning jobs when I was Head of Department in one of Ghana’s premier universities despite enormous free time they had to waste in their hostels and halls.

We therefore need to look into this sector, identify the hindrances and improve upon the conditions in order to attract more such potential hands to grow our economy, and to increase income levels of our energetic youth and make them financially source:
Prof Peter Twumasi