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Despite warnings by experts that rising unemployment, especially among the youth, poses security threats, there seems to no concrete effort by government to provide sustainable jobs.

Instead, government seems to be more interested in social protection policies which do not make any significant change in the lives of Ghanaians who desperately need sustainable jobs to improve their standard of living.

It is a fact that job creation and social protection schemes are not mutually exclusive, but job creation needs more attention in order to reduce the burden imposed by social protection schemes.

In the three-year programme agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), worth $940 million, government has been told to freeze recruitment into the public sector for the next three years.

Already, the negative business climate has impacted negatively on an already struggling private sector, resulting in massive lay-offs.

In reaction to the worsening economic situation, governments, since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, have rather shifted attention to cheap social protection measures, a clear demonstration that they have no plans to create sustainable jobs.

Ghana currently has about 40 social protection schemes aimed at alleviating the plight of the poor and vulnerable.  

President Mahama in the State of the Nation Address announced plans to consolidate them as well as introduce new ones.

It includes plans to provide 10,000 locally produced sandals for school children by the end of 2015, distribute six million textbooks, 15 million exercise books, 30,000 computers, and 500,000 pieces of school uniforms.  

 Progressively Free Secondary Education Programme for senior high school (SHS) in the 2015/2016 academic year starts in September.

A total of 367,565 students are expected to benefit from the programme, which would abolish tuition fee for both day and boarding students in public schools, but students would pay for boarding and feeding.

Even though social protection is critical to provide a safety net, this should be a short-term measure. The focus should be on the provision of sustainable jobs.

This is important because when people are gainfully employed, they and their families will not need social protection schemes.

 Also, government’s efforts to increase revenue generation for development can only materialise when more people are employed, which in effect would also increase production.

The sad aspect of the unemployment situation is that there is no up-to-date data on joblessness in the country and the characteristics of people who are employed -- including in which sectors they are working.

The Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana (UGAG) estimates over 68,000 graduates are produced annually by the country’s tertiary institutions, with about 600,000 already unemployed graduates in the country.

Other unconfirmed figures available state that about 250,000 youth join the labour force annually, over 30% of this population holding either diploma, degree or a professional certificate. This makes over 75,000 per annum joining the labour force.