Tuesday, 17th June, 2025
Hon Stephen Amoah
Nhyiaeso
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for this prestigious opportunity.
Mr Speaker, it is a pleasure to have this opportunity to present a Statement on another critical national issue, which is the impact of entrepreneurship on the global economy, and a need to consider that as a course in both Ghana’s Junior High School (JHS) and Senior High School (SHS) academic curriculum. Entrepreneurship is the ability to set up a new business and develop one’s own business with the intention of making profit instead of relying on one already created by another individual or corporate body.
Mr Speaker, there are a number of compelling reasons for the above proposition to be accorded the needed national and Executive attention. Entrepreneurship has played a remarkable role and indeed become an integral part of the global economy. It has impacted the economy by creating jobs, stimulating economic stability and reducing poverty in the world.
Mr Speaker, the job market in Ghana is congested, leaving most of the youth in an undesirable employment space. The unemployment rate in Ghana has tremendously contributed to most of the antisocial behaviours in Ghana, including insecurity, robbery, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
Mr Speaker, the Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER) indicates that only about 10 per cent of the Ghanaian graduates secure employment within a year of graduation. Besides, the Statistical Survey indicates that graduates' job hunting during their period of graduation has become an extremely tedious, cumbersome, and laborious task for them. 2.59 p.m. In Ghana, according to the Ghana Education Sector Report, about 109,874 graduates from the university education annually get their completion. However, only 10 per cent of this number secures regular jobs within that period of their graduation.
Mr Speaker, the way to go all over the world is entrepreneurship, as private sector is the engine of global socioeconomic growth. It was entrepreneurs who replaced home kerosene lamps with a brighter and cleaner burning gas in the middle to late 80s. Those ones also were displaced by a better electric light system and later came fluorescent lighting. Entrepreneurs invent a lot of new technologies: computers, the World Wide Web (www), the spreadsheet, and the newly improved drug technologies.
Mr Speaker, entrepreneurship is the key to dealing comprehensively with graduate unemployment in Ghana. A lot of our talent, out of frustration, engage in a lot of illicit socio-economic ventures and even leave the shores of Ghana in search of green pastures. These factors have affected the skilled labour of Ghana and are highly dysfunctional to the performance of our Republic. The unemployment situation has a degree of integration when it comes to insecurity and an unstable economy.
Mr Speaker, a developing economy such as Ghana, which has been endowed with a wide range of economically viable raw materials and natural resources, offers an entrepreneurial opportunity for job creation. There are, however, many setbacks to our quest to create a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem in Ghana as a substitution or supplement policy. We have a very weak entrepreneurial ecosystem as a country. The interactions among the relevant stakeholders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem lack not only the requisite structural and functional capacity but also the effectiveness to augment the employment capacity of Ghana.
Mr Speaker, there are a number of proposed solutions, including redefining our corporate focus as a country, Governments being intentional about entrepreneurship in its major policy decisions, realigning and harmonising the key stakeholders in our ecosystem. Apart from creating jobs, boosting Ghana’s economy and diminishing Government burden, entrepreneurship, if well integrated, will go a long way to answer most of our economic questions as a sovereignty. Additionally, it will play an illustrative role in Ghana’s import-driven agenda and realisation.
Mr Speaker, the most needed solution, being the impact of this Statement, is the advocacy for the inclusion of entrepreneurship as a core course in the academic curriculum of the junior high schools (JHS) and as an elective subject in the senior high school (SHS) academic curriculum.
Mr Speaker, I have already taken the needed steps, and I have unofficially contacted the Minister for Education who has given me the needed warm and not the frigid reception as he deems that as very integral in a developing economy such as Ghana’s. I am, accordingly, proposing that the relevant stakeholders, particularly Ministry of Education, take the needed steps to expedite action on the inclusion of entrepreneurship in our JHS and SHS academic curriculum. This will increase the entrepreneurship appetite of our youth to start and develop their own businesses.
Mr Speaker, once again, I thank you for honouring my request for the permission to present this very important Statement.
Hon Joseph Kwame Kumah
Kintampo North
Mr Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this Statement made by Dr Stephen Amoah, who we popularly call Sticker.
Mr Speaker, entrepreneurship is the way to go as a nation, and narrowing it down to the basic level is where I want to have a bite on, and that is perfect in the sense that the way the developed countries teach their children, even at the nursery pupils, by practicalising everything at that level is what has made them to develop faster than we have.
Mr Speaker, in Germany and other countries, one would not believe that nursery pupils are taught how to bake bread and other things, so by the time they get to primary school, they are able to use their own hands to do certain things.
Mr Speaker, at the primary level, in the same country, they ask them what they want to become in future. If the child states that he or she wants to be a mechanic, they have their academic lessons designed in such a way that there are days the students go for the normal classes and use a different period to be attached to a mechanic or a facility that they teach how to go about mechanical issues, and that is the way to go. So, the proposal or the suggestion that we should let entrepreneurship be part of our basic school curriculum is a welcoming idea.
Mr Speaker, I feel we should not just take this Statement as a light issue and drop it in the Chamber here. I am appealing that a good referral will do the trick.
Thank you very much.
Hon Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah
Manhyia South
Mr Speaker, thank you very much.
This is a very brilliant Statement, and it is very important we place a lot of emphasis on it. When ones goes to a country like Germany, it is the entrepreneurs, particularly small-scale enterprises, that provide the needed employment for people. But when one comes to our country, the contrary is what prevails. There is a lot of emphasis on employment in the public sector because there are very little opportunities, especially in the private sector. So, these are the gaps that the private sector, particularly the entrepreneurial community, fill in.
Mr Speaker, I believe that there should be a training, respectfully, for entrepreneurship. But unless we are deliberate in creating the market for local businesses and local content, we can train as many people as possible, but it will yield no fruit. When you look at the educational journey of our country, following the Dzobo Committee report of 1973, which stated that intermediate education in Ghana should consist of vocational, science, agricultural, and technical education, there was a clear indication that we were moving towards building an entrepreneurship base. Subsequently, government after government have made considerable funding and investment into the sector.
But, Mr Speaker, unless we create the necessary market, we will churn out a lot of entrepreneurs and they will be frustrated. Mr Speaker, when you come to my own Manhyia Constituency, historically, when we talk about furniture making in Ghana, it was a hub; talk of Acheampong Furniture, Kyere Furniture, and Nsu Nyamekye Furniture. Because of that there were a lot of people within the community who went to learn how to make furniture, but what has happened to them now?
They have collapsed. Why? Because there is a lot of importation of furniture from outside of this country, so local furniture is being pushed out of the market and people would then be demotivated from going into that industry. There has to be a deliberate effort on the part of Government to use its purchasing power to create a market for local entrepreneurs that will make it attractive and will incentivise other people to go into entrepreneurship in Ghana.
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.
Hon Emmanuel Kwaku Boam
Pru-East
Mr Speaker, I want to add my voice to this very Statement by my landlord in the Ashanti Region.
I live in the Nhyiaeso Constituency, so I want to contribute to this Statement. In fact, it is something that we all have to, in a way, prioritise as a country. It will interest us to know that graduates from the university who pursue Entrepreneurship and Finance are out there on the job market looking for jobs; that is quite an intriguing one. We spend resources to train our youth in Entrepreneurship and Finance; yet, they flood the job markets looking for Government well-paid jobs to be recruited into. The question is, as a country, why then do we have a special course or a programme called Entrepreneurship and Finance, and yet, the graduates from such programmes end up looking for white-collar jobs on our markets? It is a simple question and the answer is well known to us. This is because we have not spent resources as a country to train up what we desire and what we want.
Today, Mr Speaker, it will interest you once again to know that we have young artisans who are into the POP designs, who are into the design of stone mortar and bricks, who are being moved or being migrated from neighbouring countries like Togo, and when they come, they take up their jobs. They do not sleep; they work 24/7 to get this work done, and contractors in this country are paying huge sums of money to these young ones, yet we have Commission for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (CTVET) which is responsible for giving accreditation to our young entrepreneurs who have learned artisanal skill.
The question is, as a country, are we serious to make this thing happen for our young ones? What the entrepreneur, businessman or estate developer will tell you is that when they give work to our people, they are lazy about it, but when they give it to an outsider or an immigrant, he or she spends the whole night working. So, for something you need in 24 hours, they get it done. But when they give it to a local, it does not get done. Can we not have proper legislation or framework to get these things done? If not, we will come to the Chamber, a Statement will be read, everything will be done, yet we will not have the impact on the ground.
Mr Speaker, one thing I want us, as a House, to know is that, until we take entrepreneurship to a different level, there is no way our economy would be stable because the only way to make things work for us, as a country, is to identify these artisans and make them work. As we speak, we have blacksmiths in our own environment. Their works are gradually being tilted down because what we know them to be doing is aluminum saucepans or some of them are into the moulding of these local guns, and the blacksmiths are nowhere to be found in work. Yet, the Ghana Armed Forces, the Ghana Police Service, and all our security services which use guns in their operation import basic gun parts, which could have been done by these well-trained artisans with high intellect.
Mr Speaker, we have neglected them, and we go for importation. The question is, who do you give the money to? The Chinese man who has completed a year three or level three, who actually is not a diplomat nor a graduate but only an SS leaver or a middle school leaver, is able to put their hands to work on these basic things for us to import and bring into our country. Yet, our blacksmiths, who are fending for their family members and for the whole community, have been left to rot because we have so much appetite for foreign products and not local products.
Mr Speaker, I would crave your indulgence, as the earlier speaker said, we should not let the Statement die on the shelves of the Floor. I know we would give good recommendations, so that we will sit and look at how we should go about it, and then get things done.
This is my humble plea. Thank you.
Hon Abdul Kabiru Tiah Mahama
Walewale
Mr Speaker, the maker of the Statement together with the various presenters, have actually exhausted the imperativeness of us having entrepreneurship being inculcated into our educational system.
Mr Speaker, I would want to take this discussion of the Statement from the angle of the proposal or recommendations made by the maker of the Statement. Mr Speaker, the maker of the Statement has called for necessary reforms that will include entrepreneurship being at the heart of our educational endeavour. This call is based on law. This call by the maker of the Statement is what the Education Act, 2008 (Act 778), if I am right, contemplates.
Mr Speaker, the Education Act, 2008 (Act 778) was established for the development of education systems that intend to produce well-balanced individuals. Mr Speaker, the emphasis is on “well-balanced individuals” who have the requisite skills, values, knowledge, and attitude to contribute meaningfully to national development. If this is the intention, the spirit and the letter of that particular Act, nothing stops us from inculcating it in line with Section 3 of the same Act, that the relevant progressive stages: basic, secondary, and tertiary education, have entrepreneurial elements, so that the individual from infancy would get the skills of an entrepreneur.
Mr Speaker, entrepreneurship is not just a function of education, it is a function of imagination, and imaginative skills are not just gotten from the classroom. As a young person, I grew up seeing my mother engaged in entrepreneurship. Most of us in this Chamber, it is through the arts, the ingenuity and the creativity of our parents who engaged in one trade or other by solving a problem in the community that has brought us this far. And if our parents of old could do this, what stops this current generation from embarking on similar ventures that will solve emerging problems?
Mr Speaker, we are in the era of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). These are all areas we can use the entrepreneurial skills and the ability of the Ghanaian young person to create and imagine to solve. For instance, we complain about filth and our water systems in our communities. The young people can identify a problem that addresses the community water systems and that will be patronised by the community, not even Government. But the moment we do not provide the right atmosphere for the young people to thrive, it becomes difficult.
Mr Speaker, the maker of the Statement, Hon Dr Stephen Amoah, is making a call based on the Education Act, 2008 (Act 778). Mr Speaker, I think that if you are so minded, the Committee on Education would have to really look at this particular Statement and see whether our educational system is in tune with that imaginative requirement that the Act provides of the Ghanaian people.
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.
Hon Maxwell Kwame Lukutor
South Tongu
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to have a bite on a Statement made by my Senior, Dr Stephen Amoah.
I must say that the topic he raised, is an essential one. I am happy that he wants us to start from J.H.S. to S.H.S. It is necessary because the type of education we have these days is more tailored towards academic excellence only in the classroom. We do not think seriously about what we do after we attain all the academic laurels that we fight for. So, it is commonplace now to see a lot of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) holders, degree holders and Higher National Diploma (HND) holders who are all in the job market seeking for jobs that do not exist.
I always use myself as an example to a lot of people who come to me for advice and support, especially in seeking job opportunities. I always tell them that until I came to Parliament in January this year, I had never officially received salary from anybody or any institution, because I had all along worked as a selfmade person. I have acquired entrepreneurial skills and was doing all manner of things until I got here. Even after my professional training, all I was doing was what I did for myself and the things I was able to put together. It is rewarding to do these things.
One would have the autonomy to decide when to go to work and when not to go to work. One can decide to call themselves any name at all; they can be the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the Managing Director (MD), board chairman or anything. One does not need anybody to make them a board chairman; they can make themselves a board Chairman or a CEO. There is so much flexibility in the way a person can do his things. It comes with a lot of personal growth as well. I remember when I was going to do my master’s degree, I never struggled because I was already working, and I had resources to pay my fees.
Unlike a lot of youth we see now, they want to do their master’s degree and PhD, but they are looking for somebody to pay their fees for them. I tell them my concentration may be to help those who want to do their bachelor’s degrees. Usually, a master’s degree is meant for people who have work experience and want to get more of academic experience. These days, we see everybody who wants to do their master’s degree and PhD while they have not even tested any kind of work before. I just want to say that it is good my Brother has raised this issue.
Sometimes, when we want to train some of the children, the human rights activists come to say that we are engaging children in child labour and other issues. Sometimes, it is a way of training. We see people in Sogakope in my Constituency running and selling bread. Some sell abolo and others sell all kinds of things. It is all a way of giving entrepreneurial and business skills to these people to be able to do other side jobs for themselves even while they are properly in the job market.
I am proud to say that there are people at the barrier at Sogakofe who are selling bread, who have degrees and some of them even have master’s degrees, but because there is no job there to do, some of them engage in the things they do. It fetches them so much money and is not demeaning at all. I would encourage those who cannot find jobs immediately to ensure that they do something for themselves and butter their own bread.
I thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity.
Hon Lawrence Agyinsam
Hemang Lower Denkyira
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the maker of the Statement on entrepreneurship.
I think it is said that population increase is about 3 per cent, and as he rightly alluded to, our economy is able to take 10 per cent of every intake of graduates. Therefore, as the elites in politics of this country, as we have seen, we seem to have unemployment which is becoming a national security issue. It is therefore, in my opinion, a right call being made by the Hon Member for a reform in our educational system that needs to be intentional and bound with strategy.
We should ensure that when the curriculum is changed, we will be able to remove the roadblocks and encourage entrepreneurship in our ecosystem. For instance, in Boston, United States of America (USA), after university, opportunities are created for students to go through incubation and association. They make sure that the states put up buildings that are given to entrepreneurs who do not have money to work and pay a fee because they might not be able to rent an office and the likes.
It also has to be based on a strategy. What is entrepreneurship for? We are an import-dependent economy, therefore, if we want to go into entrepreneurship, we must have some key sectors that these entrepreneurs would have to go to. One is value addition in the agribusiness space. Now we are going into Information Technology (IT), so automation and coding should be an area that we need to encourage our youth. The third is technical skills that we need to develop so that at least our food processing industry will be able to see some innovations in that area.
On that note, Mr Speaker, I think you would have to make some consequential orders so that the Minister for Education would, as early as possible, give us some timelines because of its national importance and national security implication.
Thank you so much, Mr Speaker.
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