NaBCo and YEA models cannot deliver lasting jobs – Ato Forson

Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson says Ghana must restructure its economy to create lasting employment, rather than rely on temporary jobs under models such as NaBCo and the Youth Employment Agency (YEA).

Speaking in an interview on Thursday after presenting the 2027 Budget to Parliament, he argued that the economy must expand its capacity to provide decent work for a growing population.

“You end up creating temporary jobs like NaBCo, which is not a solution, or YEA models. They are temporary jobs,” he said.

Dr Forson said the government’s new economic policy would focus on modernising the economy to support the country’s current population.

He argued that an economic structure designed for far fewer people could not adequately meet the needs of about 35 million Ghanaians.

“The focus of this new economic policy is to tackle the structure of the Ghanaian economy, to modernise it into a modern economy, to be able to support 35 million people, and not 6 million people.”

The minister said the next phase of policy would look beyond macroeconomic indicators to address the economy’s underlying capacity to absorb workers.

He presented the four-year focus as an opportunity to build on stability while pursuing bigger economic changes.

“What again can we do beyond macroeconomics to tackle the structure of the economy?”

Dr Forson maintained that this shift would require continued fiscal discipline. He said the government had inherited persistent inflation and an unresolved economic crisis in 2025.

According to him, failing to act would have put the economy at risk of crashing by 2026.

The government therefore constrained spending and tightened public finance management, he said.

“There was a lot of disorder; we brought order to the public financial management system.”

He cited currency stabilisation and primary surpluses as evidence of the results. He put the primary surplus at 2.5% of GDP in 2025 and 1.5% in 2026.

Dr Forson said the government now intended to lower that target as it pursued the next phase of its economic agenda.

“Now I need to reduce the primary surplus from 1.5% of GDP to 0.5%.”

His central argument was that stabilisation must be followed by structural change that supports decent employment. He maintained that temporary job schemes could not substitute for that transformation.