Youth Employment in the Age of AI

It is shocking—almost scandalous—how little the importance of artificial intelligence is featuring in the plans of Ghana’s government for the economy, and especially for youth employment. Around the world, AI is not a passing trend. It is the operating platform of the 21st century, the invisible engine on which industry, commerce, education, healthcare, and even governance now run. The United States—the largest economy in the world—has virtually been propped up over the last five years by investments in AI, automation, and machine learning systems. Every major economy from China to India to Singapore is aligning its youth employment strategy around this unstoppable force. And yet in Ghana, the silence is deafening.

A Technology Made for Ghana

The tragedy is that AI is arguably a technology tailor-made for countries like Ghana. It is the single tool that can leapfrog entrenched infrastructure deficits and bypass the structural inefficiencies that have long condemned us to stagnation. Why build endless paper-driven bureaucracies when AI can automate public service delivery? Why allow the lack of physical libraries, hospitals, or business hubs to define our future when digital platforms infused with AI can collapse those distances and scale access? In a country where millions of young people remain jobless and frustrated, AI offers both the opportunity to absorb labour into new sectors and the ability to train people at speed for the jobs of tomorrow.

The Government’s Deafening Silence

And yet, what does Ghana’s government offer? Nothing of substance. No flagship AI employment program. No national AI skills framework. No concerted effort to prepare our youth for what the future economy will require. Instead, last week, the national conversation was consumed with government heads touting supposed “investments” from Singapore—foreign direct investment channelled into the same tired, uncompetitive sectors that have defined failure for decades. If these investments materialise at all, they will likely enrich a few politically connected players, not transform the labour market. This is how political sloganeering replaces serious thinking, while the country drifts further behind.

The Danger of Old Thinking

What is happening is the slow entrenchment of irrelevance. Nations that do not position their youth in the AI economy will be outcompeted not just in industry but in governance, health, education, and security. The consequences will be grim: more young people unemployed, more frustration, more instability, and more dangerous temptations toward populism and extremism. It will not matter how many slogans are coined about “24-hour economies” or “feed the nation” programs. Without AI at the centre, they will collapse under their own weight.

A National Wake-Up Call

The question, then, is stark: what will it take to wake up Ghana? Must we watch another generation of young people lost to poverty and hopelessness? Must we stand by as the country is locked out of the new economic order, condemned to exporting raw cocoa and gold while the world trades in algorithms and automation? Or will someone in government finally break with old habits and insist that our youth must be retooled, reskilled, and reimagined for the age of AI?

Ghana does not have the luxury of time. The politics of waiting, the culture of promises, and the obsession with projects that never finish are luxuries that are no longer affordable. The youth will not survive it. The country will not survive it.

The future is AI. The time is now. If we do not seize it, then what hope is left for us?