ECOWAS Youth Public Consultation

The story

What the work had to do

A video report on the ECOWAS youth public consultation in the southern zone of Ghana. The study is part of a wider ECOWAS effort to hear young people across West Africa, and this cut stays with one zone. The presenters name five regions: Central, Western, Eastern, Volta, and Oti. They describe the zone as culturally and economically mixed, and densely populated, and they point to the 2021 population and housing census. The problems they set out at the start are literacy, education, and work: few jobs, underemployment, and uneven access to school. The method was qualitative. The team ran focus group discussions in rural and urban places, 18 groups against a target of 16. They spoke with 71 young people, above the 66 they had planned for. Forty of the 71 were young women, which the report marks as a deliberate choice because education and employment land differently on them. The room also included public and private employees, self-employed people, national service personnel, graduates, students, people living near borders, and persons with disabilities. The interviews then carry the findings in the participants' own words. Several say the hard part is not only finishing school but finding work afterwards, and that there are more graduates than openings. Prices come up as a daily pressure. One argues that leaders are looking after their own position rather than how citizens get on. Another says a certificate is demanded for work that a parent without schooling cannot get, and that this is not only a government failure. A teacher who had wanted to work in a bank talks about starting something rather than waiting to be hired, and about a longer aim of becoming an immigration officer. Others ask that qualified people be hired instead of relatives, that families and churches help until a young person is stable, and that government be held to account. One wants to study law. One wants clean water so fewer babies are born with deformities. One has been to repeated interviews and still has no job.