Mr Gerald Gluskowski, Cluster Coordinator, Sustainable Economic Development, GIZ Ghana, said closing the employability gap and mismatch between the financial sector’s high demand for qualified personnel is critical to the growth of the sector.
He said GIZ Ghana and partners had introduced the job-readiness programme to train 150 University graduates, 75 per cent of whom were expected to be employed six months after the training.
Mr Gluskowski was speaking at the launch of the Aya Institute for Finance and Management, a German-Ghanaian Initiative for excellence in Accra.
Aya Institute is a public-private partnership of the German Development Cooperation and four private partners, which is expected to contribute to an improvement in the capacities of future and current employees of the financial sector in the country.
He said GIZ is currently implementing 16 different PPP projects, covering a huge variety of sectors, topics, and activities, ranging from apparel to health, and from automotive to the financial sector.
The Coordinator said they strongly believe that the financial sector played a crucial role as a backbone of Ghana’s socio-economic growth.
“For a truly healthy economic growth, well-functioning and locally present financial institutions are needed, which in turn work according to international standards and are networked accordingly,” he said.
He said GIZ saw that Ghana was already on the right track but could make faster progress with more and better qualified specialists and from the development perspective.
However, it is crucial that better and new jobs are created and filled through better education and training.
Mr Gluskowski said more people would be trained in Aya’s open and customized training, but there was the need to create more jobs to absorb the qualified professionals.
Currently, there is a mismatch between the existing demand for qualified professionals in the sector on the one side, and plenty of job-seeking university graduates on the other.
“Here we noticed that, from the point of view of the companies, the graduates lack various soft skills as well as special technical competencies in order to be able to enter the job directly,” he added.
This is exactly why together with partners we are introducing the Young Professionals Programme, as part of the partnership.
The Young Professional Programme is a 12-week intensive training that includes four weeks of internship at one of the partner companies.
Madam Abenaa Kessewaa Brown, the Executive Director of Aya Institute of Finance and Management, said the Ghanaian financial sector required qualified and specialised staff to increase efficiency and remain competitive in a challenging and evolving market environment.
She said to foster the continued growth of the Ghanaian financial services sector and ensure inclusion, more digitally minded, well-trained talent was required.
The Executive Director said the vision of the Institute was to be a catalyst for people development, ethical and inspirational leadership as well as socio-economic change across Africa, one learner at a time.
Madam Brown said Aya’s training programmes follow a learner-centric approach, where the learner was the focus and an active participant instead of being a passive recipient of content.
“We are excited to introduce our unique learning experience to the financial service industry and all sectors of the Ghanaian economy, to help develop the skills of teams and improve their performance and productivity,” she added.
The Executive Director said the Aya Institute year to date had trained about 400 professionals from 11 institutions so far, 27 per cent of whom have been women.
John Maxwell Addo, a Member of the Aya Governing Council, said the Institute sought to fill a gap in the Ghanaian market by bringing world-class faculty and learners together for unique learning experience that would ultimately add value to participate and their careers and help to transform the country.