Issue #4 — Skills Development and Education: Escaping The Poverty Trap into Development
This article discusses the second factor required by developing countries to escape the poverty trap, ceteris paribus.
First published on my Instagram Page @nfreduagyeman
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Education is perhaps the surest route out of poverty for countries and for individuals. It arms recipients with the necessary tools required to ride economic storms. Perhaps, since the nineteenth century, education has taken on a new importance, and increasingly so. Today, as information becomes more important, the ability to transform this intangible asset into a viable product has become 21st century’s version of the alchemist’s transmutation formula.
Education, in this discussion, especially includes skills development through both technical and vocational training and apprenticeship. So often in Africa, the focus of governments has been on formal training in the sciences and humanities to the neglect of all other forms of skills acquisition, especially technical and vocational training. In Ghana, no sector has undergone a flux of changes than the education sector. Starting from the mid-eighties or thereabout, the military government introduced a new system, the Junior Secondary School and Senior Secondary School systems, of three years each, to replace the Middle School and Ordinary and Advanced Level Systems, respectively. The Dzobo Report of 1973, New Structure and Content of Education, was the source for these new changes.
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Many educators rebelled against these new systems as people are likely to do against something they do not understand — or do not want to understand — and whose impact they could hardly measure or perceive. Most educators considered the system flawed as it fast-tracked individuals through school by reducing the seven years of secondary education to three years. Overall, it reduced the number of years one spends in school at pre-tertiary level from 17 to 13.
The government nationalised the junior secondary school part of every private school, perhaps in a bid to avoid sabotage. Years later, university authorities would introduce University Entrance Examinations for the early batch of students coming from the new Senior Secondary School system, for fear that they might not be cut out for the robust and difficult university studies. This arcane strategy would eventually be scraped to allow direct entry when students proved that they could outperform their counterparts with A’Level certificates.
Though during this period vocational and technical education were promoted, with secondary schools dedicated to technical and vocational education, this would eventually fade away as technical education took the back seat and schools replaced Wood Work, Auto Mechanics, Electricals, with Geography, History, Biology, Chemistry, among others. Even the Polytechnics, which were established to absorb technical students have recently been given university status, not just in name but also in content. Instead of offering technical education, they’ve branched into Accounting, Business, Marketing, among others and increasingly making these subjects their major focus.
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But this isn’t a history of Ghana’s education sector (for that read Adu-Gyamfi, Donkoh, and Addo (2016) Educational Reforms in Ghana: Past and Present, published in Journal of Education and Human Development vol. 5, №3 pp. 158–172). What this seeks to show is that there has been a gradual shift in emphasis from technical and vocational education, which were the crux of the JSS and SSS. This has led to a paucity of quality machinists and technical expertise.
Apprenticeship has been dumped into the informal sector. It has become a route for failed students who are unable to get the necessary grades to pursue higher studies in the secondary school, mainly. However, a country seeking to develop must begin with production. And production begins with first having the right combination of people with managerial and technical skills. In Ghana, we lack the latter, and the former lacks the experience.
There are garment factories in Ghana that bring in expertise from Asia because they can’t find the right skills level in the country. In the end, they are forced to train staff, who also end up leaving after receiving the training. One such company has only one Ghanaian master cutter.
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It is obvious from this that a country with skilled workers is in a good stead to draw large manufacturing plants. This is because, ceteris paribus, the “search & train” cost of individuals with the relevant skills set becomes very low. Asians are known for their tool-making skills. Hence it’s no wonder that they’ve become the manufacturing hub of the world. In an interview with Tim Cook, on why companies prefer to manufacture in China, the Apple CEO stated that “There’s a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I’m not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.”
Hence, for any country, seeking to compete, focus must be on educating the population but also on equipping them with usable skills. Currently, we’ve been told that VW has opened plants in Rwanda and is seeking to open another in Ghana. What proportion of the factory workers, on the production side, will be Africans, Rwandans or Ghanaians?
People have been clamouring for schools to teach entrepreneurship, and sadly these schools have acquised to the demand. But this is a dead end. You can’t sell something you don’t have. You can’t be an entrepreneur if you cannot produce to generate money. The richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates among them, did not start with entrepreneurship. They started by producing something and finding ways to sell them. The “selling” part, the art of becoming an entrepreneur, can always be learnt. It is a skill you can develop on the go. In Africa, we have turned it around. We learn the definition and principles of entrepreneurship when we cannot produce anything. What this creates is low-level entrepreneurs, transforming raw corn into roasted corn. Did Elon Musk learn how to sell before he learnt how to build?
If, in Ghana, we approach education from a more practical perspective, we will take ourselves out of poverty. No country had lifted a larger proportion of its population out of poverty than China has done over the last decade. According to McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report released on September 12, 2018, between 1965–2016, China pulled 730 million of its people out of poverty, leading a list followed by India with 170m. According to the BBC, in the Jiangsu province of China, there are only 17 poor people out of the population of 80m. The MGI report went on to cite manufacturing as the cause of these huge gains.
Africa can no longer look on unconcerned, focusing on a minute aspect of education. Yes, we need the doctors, lawyers, administrators, and others but how can the doctor work if there are no beds or X-ray machines?
The second key to escaping the poverty trap into development is therefore skills development and education.
