It’s a new month and the The School Of Life-Ghana welcomes you with an article that will linger on your mind for this month and many more months to come, not to exaggerate, it could be years. As a community of Youth who are poised for positive change, sitting down idly, will be a breach of our mantra. In our bid to take responsibility and create a better tomorrow, we shareour thoughts on how Africa’s development problems can be ameliorated, with a more focus on Ghana.
Paramount among the development problems identified are: high rates of unemployment, poor sanitation, high rates of illiteracy and poor infrastructure. The causes of these problems are political instability, high tastes for foreign goods, the knowledge based educational system, low level of technology, to mention but a few.Let’s read the brilliant ideas brought together by our Change Makers.
The first issue to be explored is the high rate of unemployment.In tackling this issue, we looked at it from human resourcedevelopment. The human resource comprises the skills,knowledge, skilled and unskilled labor and other efforts neededfor production and development. Sadly, the educational systemin Ghana continues to be knowledge based rather than skilloriented. Will we all end up with white collar jobs? This is onequestion that educational planners fail to look at. What ishappening to our vocational skills? How many of them are in the country? When students fail their B.E.C.E and W.A.S.S.C.E,they think that is the end of the journey for them. These are people who are in many ways endowed with skills, who could have developed their vocational skills. Everyone wants to be seen in the university. How many universities are there in Ghana and can they contain all of us? Can the economy provide white collar jobs for all these graduates? It will be in the best interest of all of us if we focus on developing our human resource with other skills, such that even after school when they fail to land for themselves jobs, at least, they can make good use of their skills for livelihood. In this vein, community skills fair can be held to train people in their localities.
Secondly, let’s look at poor sanitation. Isn’t it worrisome that governments in Africa allocate huge sums of money in annual budgets to solve the issue of poor sanitation? What are we doing as so called patriotic citizens? We affirmed that environmental laws and regulations should be strictly implemented and law breakers punished.
Thirdly, our poor infrastructure. Development can be arrived at when there are accompanying infrastructure. Let’s look at transport systems, schools, clinics, oh how poor! Most of them are in dilapidated states. How do we expect the farmer to transport his produce to the market when the bridge in the middle of the road has caved in, denying access? And how do we expect students to do well in school when they do not even have a conducive environment for learning? There are more questions to be asked… We as positive minded people believe that we the citizens can help the government in infrastructure provision. There are individuals and organizations who are endowed with financial resources. We are talking about collective responsibility. We have NGOs, religious organizations and individuals providing amenities in our communitues. It’s just a matter of Public Private Partnerships and the government liaising with these organizations.
Again, we draw our focus on agriculture. Africa has more countries engaged in agriculture. Sadly, the agriculture here does not reap great returns. Most of the agriculturalists engage insubsistence farming. Our produce are attacked by pests and diseases, causing on farm and post harvest losses.Again,rudimentary methods used in agriculture yields low productivity. TSOL is looking at agricultural mechanization and value addition of our agricultural products so that our products can sell on the international market.
Finally, we want to address this critical issue of discontinuity of good projects by new projects. Each government comes with its own policies for the country. However, there are times that the laudable projects of previous governments were abandoned, simply because “it is not their tenure”, “We want to follow our manifesto,” etc. This leaves many projects hanging, which if they had been implemented, would have served the country massively well. With one voice, we chant, “Operation Continue the Good Projects.”These are the brilliant ideas of the TSOL-Gh Community.
This topic is not the first time it is being discussed and neither will it be the last time, as the adage goes, “problems are inevitable.” However, we do hope that this piece will find its way into the hearts of people who are optimistic about Africa’s positive change, people who do not want to sit in the sidelines but take action. Add your voice to ours, and let’s march on. Together. Regardless.
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Editor In Chief: Sandra Serwaa Boateng
The School of Life 