The Center for Democratic Development (CDD) current Afrobarometer report has shown that,majority of the country’s youth are in supports with higher taxes to fund programmes to help them secure jobs.

This comes after the youth identified unemployment as the major headache and would support any move including high taxes to ensure that their future is secured and can also afford them the opportunity to contribute their quota to national development.

For the youth, the nation’s taxation system can be well structured to ensure that the current workforce would be able to fund prudent programmes to engage more of the youth in active ventures which would result in more people getting into the taxation bracket to generate more revenue for national development.

A released from the CDD indicated  that: “In Ghana, unemployment and exclusion from democratic processes and decision-making are blamed for leaving youth vulnerable to manipulation by political parties, which engage some of them in political violence. Although successive governments have, over the years, tried to address the youth’s needs through various social intervention programs aimed at skills training and job creation, the challenges persist.”

The report was stressed that unemployment and education are the most important problems that young Ghanaians want the government to address, adding that, in surveys over the past decade, unemployment has consistently ranked No. 1 among the priorities of Ghana’s youth, with education a consistently in second or third position.

When Afrobarometer asked adults of all ages to cite the most important problems they want the government to address, infrastructure/roads was the most frequently cited priority with unemployment and education coming in second and third respectively.

59 percent of the respondents said job creation should be the highest priority if the government could increase its spending to help the youth. According to the report, urban residents are more likely than their rural counterparts to cite job creation and less likely to prioritize education. Likewise, educated citizens are more likely to prioritize job creation – 69 percent among those with post-secondary education vs. 47 percent among those with no formal education – and less likely to prioritize investment in education.

Paa Kweku Eshun Talksafrica.com