For a number of years, the African continent has been at the centre of speculation regarding the future of work and digital skills, and Ghana has been one of the countries highlighted for its potential supply of digital skills talent which could support the transformation of Ghana into a digital economy.
Our latest report on The Digital Skills Pathways in Ghana explores the digital skills supply and demand from young people who are seeking to gain digitally-enabled work to the employers that are providing digital work.
Ghana has seen mobile and internet penetration growth year-on-year since 2017. This alongside a growing services sector places Ghana in a ripe position to digitally transform its workforce. Alongside the rapid development and adoption of digital technology has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on remote work – there is a need to hire digitally skilled talent.
This report looks to better understand the state of digital skills (supply and demand) in Ghana from a grounded perspective that involves young people, employers, and digital skills training providers. The research addresses two broad questions:
- What is the supply of digital skills in Ghana?
- What are the career pathways that young people take after completing digital skills training?
- How can digital skills training programmes support employability for young people?
- What is the demand for digital skills in Ghana?
- What digital skills do they currently have within their organisations?
- What sourcing and recruitment strategies do they use and how effective are they?
- What skills are they in demand for now and in the future?
Our key recommendations from this report include but are not limited to bolster intermediate and advanced digital skills training, expand the digital talent pipeline to include more young people in school, digital skills need to be integrated into primary, secondary, tertiary, technical and vocational education (TVET), build stronger public-private partnerships to scale digital skills training to more of the populations; jobtech startups need further support to ensure high-quality supply is matched to demand.
The findings presented in this report are the outcome of several research efforts conducted by MEST’s Research and Impact team. In addition, insights also come from our experience working in and engaging with the digital and tech ecosystem in Ghana through digital skills training and job matching initiatives via Pre-MEST, portfolio activities, venture acceleration programmes with MEST Express and MEST Scale, and partnerships and collaborations with corporates in Ghana.
