BRIEF HISTORY OF THE YOUTH EMPLOYMENT AGENCY (YEA)

Unemployment among the youth is a global menace of which Ghana is no exception. In Ghana, the scourge predates the 4th Republican dispensation.

 But it is an incontrovertible fact that it manifested the more following the divestiture of State –Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and Corporations during the revolutionary era in the mid 1980’s as part of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities.

Statistics available indicate that on yearly basis an estimated 100,000 youth graduate from the various tertiary institutions in the country unto the competitive job market which cannot recruit 10% of that population.

Efforts to address the unemployment menace confronting the youth in Ghana became rife

Considering the situation a national security risk, successive governments in the 4th Republican dispensation have made efforts towards addressing this hydra-headed problem.

 The Kufour administration set the pace and took a bold step in 2001 and undertook a nationwide registration of unemployed youth to have a good understanding of the nature and scope of the unemployment situation to deal decisively with it.

The government came up with a strategic intervention initiative by introducing the Skills Training and Employment Placement Programme (STEP) to give readily employable skills to the youth and provide them with employment opportunities.

Based on the success story of this programme, the government decided to improve on these measures by implementing a more comprehensive and integrated system of engaging the attention of the youth through the introduction of the Technical, Vocation and Education Testing Policy (TVET) to sharpen the technical and vocational skills of the youth to make them more competitive.

The Ghana Youth Jobs Corps Programme or the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) was launched in November 2006 as an enhanced programme built on the experiences of the earlier initiatives to provide more employment opportunities for the youth. The programme has its roots in helping to achieve the Millennium Development Goals MDGs and thus laid emphasis on poverty reduction, improved health service delivery, access to education and good governance. The overriding objective is to reduce unemployment in Ghana.

The programme was designed to cater for the youth in the age bracket of 18-35 years to contribute their quota towards the sustainable socio- economic development of the nation.

The idea is to serve as a stop-gap measure of providing relief to parents and school leavers idling home as a result of lack of job avenues while the job market gets enough time to structure its job creation capacities for the youth to enter.

At the same time, it was to afford government breathing space to take steps to give legal backing to the programme to make it sustainable.

Between 2006 and December 2008, the Kufuor Administration (incumbent government’s) intervention was able to roll out seven (7) modules out of the initial 10 modules of which a total of 106,000 Ghanaian youth were engaged and deployed in the Youth in Agri-Business, Community Protection Assistants (CPAs), Paid Internship and Industrial Attachment, Health Extension Workers (HEW) Waste and Sanitation Module, Community Education Teaching Assistants (CETA )module and Volunteer module.

The new Administration that took over the reign of governance from January 2009 decided to rebrand and reposition the Agency as a Public Service Organisation to better serve the teeming unemployed youth. The ensued transformation (shift in policy initiatives) and the infusing of entrepreneurial skills training gave birth to the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) in October 2012.

With the expansion of its scope and the absence of a legal framework to regulate the activities of the Agency, it suffered some serious infractions that opened the Agency up for malfeasance and exploitation in what later became known as the GYEEDA Scandal leading to the government setting up a Ministerial Probe. The outcome was the issuance of a Government White Paper that indicted a former CEO and a Consultant to the Agency leading to their conviction by the courts.

Following this development, management in consultation with the relevant stakeholders therefore, presented a draft Bill through Cabinet to Parliament. In February 2015, the Youth Employment Agency Bill (Youth Employment Agency Act 2015, Act 887) was passed into law and assented to by the President in March 2015.Subsequently, a legislative instrument (Youth Employment Agency Regulations 2016, L.I. 2231) was passed in 2016 and gazetted in February 2016 and came into force in March 2016.

Source:yea.gov.gh