ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF GOVERNMENT’S YOUSTART INITIATIVE ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A MEANS OF TACKLING UNEMPLOYMENT IN ACCRA

Abstract

This study was on assessing the Impact of Government’s YouStart Initiative on Entrepreneurship as a Means of Tackling Unemployment in Accra. Three objectives were raised which included: To ascertain the activities of YouStart initiative towards unemployment alleviation in Ghana, to  ascertain the extent which YouStart initiative generate empowerment to the youths of Ghana  and to ascertain how YouStart Initiative alleviate poverty in Ghana. The total population for the study is 75 selected residents in Accra. The researcher used questionnaires as the instrument for the data collection. Descriptive Survey research design was adopted for this study. The data collected were presented in tables and analyzed using simple percentages and frequencies. The study recommended that the government of the state should see to welfare of her citizen by ensuring that jobs are created in ministries and parastatals and these are made open for all rather than embarking on underground recruitment exercise. Most importantly, beneficiaries of youstart should be made to stay on the programme until they find paid employment rather than laying them off after two years to join the mass unemployed paupers.

Chapter one

Introduction

1.1Background of the study

For Sub-Sahara Africa to stand among the nations of the world it must be able to take entrepreneurship development and employment importantly. Most importantly the youth are the machine that will propel development and transformation. They are an important facet of industrial growth and development of a nation. Plecher, (2020) asserted that in 2019, the unemployment rate in Ghana was at approximately 4.33 percent of the total labor force. The unemployment rate is the percentage of a country’s labor forces that are without jobs but are available to work and actively seeking employment. Ghana’s unemployment rate is above the worldwide unemployment rate, and compared to other Sub-Saharan African countries and other regions, Ghana has a relatively average rate of unemployment. Biney, (2015), opined that the economy of Ghana fared well in the 1960s and early 70s such that the issue of unemployment of university graduates was not a problem. This was because, manufacturing industries built by the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government under the leadership of late President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah were in operation. There were number of state-owned industries operating in the regions and districts of Ghana respectively, such that the youth who complete school could seek employment from, and subsequently become employed. For instance, Bonsa Tyre Company Limited, Ghana Rubber Estate Company and Aboso Glass Factory were in full operations at the former Wassa West District now Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipal alone, creating job opportunities to trained engineers, technologists, administrators and even ordinary factory hands. More than 600 of such state-owned and managed industries have collapsed, rendering many people jobless and unemployed. Tsekpo, (2014), cited in Biney (2015), perceiving unemployment from the measurement perspective opines that unemployment covers people who are: out of work, want a job, have actively sought work in the previous four weeks and are available to start work within the next fortnight; or out of work and have accepted a job that they are waiting to start in the next fortnight. What these mean is that a typical economically active labour market participant can be classified as employed or unemployed within days or weeks or months. The pendulum can swing between these categories in quick succession.

According to Pillai (2011:29) “unemployment can be defined as a state of worklessness for a man fit and willing to work”. Basically, graduate unemployment is a jobless situation with a person with an academic degree. According to the BBC (2011:6), the International Labour Organization(ILO) has reported that the world’s economy is on the verge of a new and deeper jobs recession that may ignite social unrest. The report continues to say that it will take at least five years for employment in advance economies to return to pre-crisis levels. In its world report of 2011, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said a stalled global economic recovery had begun to “dramatically affect” labour markets. DeutcheWelle TV recently reported at its website that some countries in the Eurozone are experiencing increasing rate of unemployment. The report mentioned countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. Pele (2011:38) “in Ghana reliable data is difficult to find but estimates from the world bank indicators put the number of youth at about 65% of the unemployed” and the number of unemployed graduates is part of the figure. According to Jonah (2011), Ghana’s Labour Commission estimates the unemployed graduate figure to be a staggering 700,000 to date.

To help tackle youth unemployment by promoting youth entrepreneurship in the country, the government unveiled the YouStart initiative in the 2022 budget. This initiative, according to the government, is aimed at “supporting young entrepreneurs to gain access to capital, training, technical skills, and mentoring to enable them launch and operate their own businesses.” It is projected that YouStart, to which the government has allocated GH¢1 billion in the 2022 budget and pledged additional GH¢2 billion in 2023–2024, is expected to result in the creation of 1 million jobs within the next three years.

We view the YouStart Initiative as a worthy intervention by the state to expand employment opportunities for the youth. Such opportunities are currently limited, giving rise to high youth unemployment and underemployment in the country. Entrepreneurship is a vital source of production, job creation, and innovation in any economy. Therefore, the YouStart initiative, which is intended to provide funding and other assistance to aid the development of start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures by young people, has the potential to improve economic growth and employment generation in Ghana.

However, for YouStart to be successful and avoid the failures that similar initiatives suffered in the past, the program needs to be effectively and sustainably managed. This would require targeting the YouStart support to entrepreneurial ventures or business proposals that have been rigorously vetted to ascertain their viability and sustainability, as well as their contribution to the broader development strategy of the nation. It would also require keeping partisan and political interferences at bay in managing or implementing the initiative, since these are sure ways to encourage wastage and corruption, which would ultimately cause the program’s failure.

Statement of the problem

Unemployment remains one of the biggest social problems in Ghana today. Available data from GBS (2010) shows that more than half of Ghanaians population is currently living in squalid livelihood and has consistently remained a worrisome phenomenon demanding urgent national attention (Obadan, 2017). This is not unconnected to the fact that the unemployment rate continues and had remained unabated in society, which gives room for other social vices such as armed robbery, burglary as corroborated, which asserted that insecurity in Ghana can be linked with growing poverty rate. To tackle this problem, successive Governments of Ghana have implemented a range of measures, such as YouStart initiative programme. The YouStart initiative programme initiative is envisaged to address a range of social problems such as curbing the incidence of poverty, teeming youth unemployment, entrepreneurship orientation and increasing school enrolment. The YouStart initiative programme, which is the job creation component of the policy aims at reducing unemployment and is targeted at the Ghanaian youths. However, creating a policy and its implementation to achieve set goals appear to be mutually exclusive in the Ghana context. Efforts by successive governments to combat the monumental unemployment as well as other initiatives geared toward alleviating the precarious situation surrounding the Ghana youths and to enhance the quality of life had ended in fiasco, as a consequence of abysmal and porous implementation of the said programmes. The aim of this study is to assessing the Impact of Government’s YouStart Initiative on Entrepreneurship as a Means of Tackling Unemployment in Accra

Objective of the study

The objectives of the study are;

1. To ascertain the activities of YouStart initiative towards unemployment alleviation in Ghana
2. To  ascertain the extent which YouStart initiative generate empowerment to the youths of Ghana  
3. To ascertain how YouStart Initiative alleviate poverty in Ghana.

Research question

The following research questions were formulated;

1. What are the activities of YouStart initiative towards unemployment alleviation in Ghana?
2. To what extent do YouStart initiatives generate empowerment to the youths of Ghana?
3.  To what extent do YouStart Initiative alleviate poverty in Ghana?

Research Hypotheses

The following research hypotheses were formulated;

H0: there are no activities of YouStart initiative towards unemployment alleviation in Ghana

H1: there are activities of YouStart initiative towards unemployment alleviation in Ghana

H0:  YouStart initiatives do not generate empowerment to the youths of Ghana

H2:  YouStart initiatives generate empowerment to the youths of Ghana

H0: YouStart Initiative alleviate do not poverty in Ghana

H3: YouStart Initiative alleviate poverty in Ghana

Significance of the study

The result of this study will no doubt to a large extent expose the weaknesses and achievements of past unemployment initiative.

Equally, it would provide basis for effective guidance for the facilitators to modify/reinforce their attitude towards achieving the set goals for the programmes put in place.

It is also believed that the result of this study will avail the government the opportunity to study past attempts at alleviating unemployment to see where their mistakes lies and then devise a means for progress in this regard

This study will be of immense benefit to other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.

Scope of the study

The scope of the study covers assessing the Impact of Government’s YouStart Initiative on Entrepreneurship as a Means of Tackling Unemployment in Accra. The study will be limited to youths of Accra

Limitation of the study

1. 1.        Financial constraint– Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet, questionnaire and interview).

2.        Time constraint– The researcher will simultaneously engage in this study with other academic work. This consequently will cut down on the time devoted for the research work.

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