What 7 Focus Groups Across Northern Ghana Taught Me About Youth Unemployment
Co-facilitating ECOWAS-commissioned youth consultations, one finding cut across every site and demographic — and it wasn't the one everyone expected.
In 2024 I helped facilitate a series of ECOWAS-commissioned youth consultations across Upper East and North East Ghana — rural and urban sites both. We ran structured focus group discussions, deliberately stratified across very different groups of young people:
- Unemployed graduates
- Apprentices and trainees
- Public- and private-sector employees
- Galamsey (small-scale mining) workers
- Persons with disabilities
- Migrants
- Youth-association leaders
The assumption going in — the one that funds most youth programmes — is that the problem is a skills gap. Train people, and jobs follow.
That's not what we heard
Across every site and nearly every demographic, the dominant theme was different. It was a fairness gap.
Educated, trained young people described being unable to access jobs without political connections or bribes. The barrier wasn't capability. It was a system that didn't reward it. Alongside that ran a second, geographic frustration: a widely-held perception that investment concentrates in southern Ghana while the north is overlooked.
Why this matters for anyone building here
I later led the team — including randomly selected youth participants — that presented these findings to ECOWAS in Accra. But the lesson has stayed with me as a builder, not just a facilitator.
If you design a training platform, a jobs marketplace, or a civic tool for this context and you've quietly assumed the problem is skills, you will build the wrong thing beautifully. The most important research often happens before any requirement is written down.
Listen to the field first. The data will surprise you.