NDC unveils ‘comprehensive’ strategy to create 1.7m jobs

• Oct 14, 2024

The National Democratic Congress on Monday, October 14, 2024, announced what it calls a comprehensive employment and jobs creation strategy for a John Mahama presidency.

The NDC says it will create 1.7 million jobs between 2025 and 2029.

This will absorb the expected 300 thousand yearly entrants into the workforce and reduce current unemployment levels by 120,000 of each year.

The party’s Employment and Jobs Creation committee announced at a briefing in Accra.

NDC will achieve these targets despite the debilitating employment deficit and economic crisis that the NPP will leave behind come 7th January 2025, through a strategy resting on five pillars.

We call this strategy MAN-UP-C:

a. M – Modernise and revamp employment institutions and legislation focused on job
creation;

b. A - “Aspire 24” programme to reorient employer and employee mindsets’;

c. N – “National Employment Trust” to mobilise resources for a concerted jobs push;

d. UP - “Levelling Up” programme to ensure inclusiveness in employment; and

e. C – Coordination through a high-level “National Employment Coordination Committee”

The Truth About Unemployment

At a media engagement on 25th August 2024, the NPP presidential candidate, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, repeated his claim that the NPP has created 2.3 million jobs in 7 years and that unemployment is declining. He offered no evidence for his claims because they are untrue.

Joblessness and related poverty, hopelessness, and despair are on the increase across the length and breadth of the country. The Ghana Statistical Service’s Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey states that 2.1 million Ghanaians, representing 14.7% of our labour force, are unemployed. This is an increase of more than 1 million unemployed people since 2017. The unemployment rate has increased from 8.3% in 2017 to 14.7% by 2023. That is the truth.

Additionally, many in employment cannot make ends meet. Of the 11.2 million people employed in 2023, an overwhelming 8.2 million (almost 70%) are in vulnerable work with low-paying jobs, no social protection, and poor working conditions. They are trapped in a perennial cycle of poverty. This is the category that we call “working poor”. This is also the truth.