Technical apprenticeship as a stepping stone to employment – insights from Ghana
It gives us great pleasure to announce that the recent addition of a Catering Workshop and toilet facilities to Ghana’s ICCES Tetrefu School brings promising insights!
We firmly believe that education is the quickest and most certain way out of poverty. However, it turns out that the local job market in many countries often provides few opportunities for academic careers.
A training path after school is undervalued despite its importance. Many countries in the Global South have labor markets that offer job opportunities based on practical skills rather than knowledge. In these cases, completing a technical apprenticeship rather than a degree is more beneficial to adapt optimally to regional conditions and have job opportunities locally.
The Tetrefu Community is a community where many families are impoverished and have little hope of breaking out of that cycle. The Tetrefu training center creates opportunities for the poorest and most disadvantaged young people to enter the labor market close to home, directly after graduating. This is absolutely critical because many regions simply don’t offer any job profiles that require a degree.
Learning practical skills in fields such as construction, computer technology, tailoring or gastronomy is essential for developing job prospects.
As a result of becoming employable, the future of the young vocational students and their families will be positively influenced as well as strengthening the entire Tetrefu community!
The previous gender distribution in the training center demonstrated that the training branches were still very male-dominated. It was important for the school to create more opportunities for women. By constructing a new catering workshop, this inequality has been and will continue to be adjusted, encouraging more girls to pursue an education.
More specifically, this has been demonstrated by the increased number of students, particularly girls, who are now enrolled, giving them the chance to become economically independent and empowered. As one female student explained: “The catering workshop will help us to focus on our education in the modern standards and help us to achieve our goal in the future to meet the industries’ requirements”.
To conclude, we would like to give a big thanks to our donor GERL. Dental and the implementing partner OneChild Ghana, for making this very special project possible. The impact is far greater than just a solid catering workshop and we cannot wait to see the student’s accomplishments in the years to come!
