Dr Essibu Calls for Education Reform to Promote STEM and TVET
The Head of the Agricultural Education Department of the University of Education, Winneba, Dr Joseph Kobina Essibu, has called for reforms in Ghana’s education system to promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and Technical and Vocational Education and Training.
He said the country needed to reshape its education trajectory to build a skilled workforce capable of driving economic transformation.
We need to reform our education trajectory. We need to promote STEM and TVET.
Dr Essibu said skills development reform was no longer optional, but a necessity if Ghana was to build the human capital required for national development.
He made the call in Accra last Friday while presenting a paper on at a high-level youth leadership summit dubbed .
Skills development no longer optional
Dr Essibu said Ghana faced a serious mismatch between the skills young people possessed and the skills the economy required.
He noted that although the country had valuable natural resources, including gold, cocoa and oil, it continued to lose value when raw materials were exported or left to others for processing.
According to him, Ghana did not have a resource problem, but a conversion problem. He said turning raw potential, whether natural resources or young minds, into productive value required skilled human capital.
Dr Essibu, who is also the Founder and Chief Executive of Ideal College Schools, said several factors made skills development reform necessary.
Industry-focused training
He said countries across the world were moving from purely academic education to skills-based training that responded to real industry needs, and Ghana could not afford to be left behind.
He added that employers now needed graduates who could work competently from the first day on the job, making it important for training to align with both local and international industry benchmarks.
Dr Essibu also called for a new concept of learning and curriculum reform in skills development.
Learning must move beyond theory to practical, hands-on, competency-based training.
He said Ghana’s curriculum should be flexible, relevant and responsive to the changing job market.
He further urged a new approach to assessment, saying it was not enough to test what learners knew on paper. He said assessment should also measure what learners could do through competency-based evaluation, projects, case studies, discovery and practical demonstration.
Dr Essibu said stronger quality assurance mechanisms were also needed to ensure that Ghanaian certificates were recognised and trusted, while graduates remained globally competitive.
Agriculture and development
Dr Essibu said it was unfortunate that many students who studied agriculture at various levels of education ended up not working in the field.
He said agriculture was still often viewed as a last-option job path instead of a modern and profitable business, a mindset he said discouraged graduates.
He said reforming skills development in Ghana should equip young people with practical skills, make them employable and strengthen national development.
Dr Essibu noted that Ghana had, in recent years, begun transforming its skills development sector to make training more industry-relevant, competency-based, inclusive and aligned with labour-market needs.
He advised young people to build technical competence alongside leadership competence, stressing that Ghana’s development was not only a government project but a generational responsibility.