By Alex Osei-Boateng
ACCRA, March 18 (Xinhua) -- Ghanaian graduates and students flocked to the premises of the University of Ghana on Saturday to take part in the 2017 campus recruitment fair organized by the Confucius Institute.
The purpose of the campus recruitment was to connect Chinese enterprises with Ghanaian students.
Most of the graduates and students who will be completing their university education soon had one mission of joining the one-day fair: to pry for employment opportunities with the 35 participating Chinese enterprises.
Joseph Edward Yawson, a final year Chinese language student at the University of Ghana sees the fair as a very good opportunity for students and graduates to link up with potential employers.
"Annually we get about 3,000 students who graduate from various universities and so if we have this program annually it will help them land jobs," he told Xinhua.
"I am a bit confused as to where to drop your CVs because there are a lot of great companies. I hope I will get a very good job," he said.
"It is a very nice forum. I think Ghanaians should emulate them," Margaret Osei, a visitor told Xinhua.
For Ethel Afful, a graduate who studied Chinese at the University of Ghana, the fair is a good initiative to help people get jobs and reduce the level of unemployment in Ghana.
"I have visited seven companies and they are all looking for translators and since I can speak Chinese, I move through all of them because you never know," she said.
Unemployment in Ghana is on the rise. Many companies have downsized their workforce to cope with the harsh economic conditions. Competition for jobs becomes very stiff.
In Ghana, public and private universities churn out over 55,000 graduates annually.
In recent years, the polytechnics have also been upgraded to universities and are also going to add onto the number, meaning that yearly Ghana is going to have over 55,000 university graduates who will be looking for jobs.
This number is expected to rise as more universities are established.
The Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana Professor Samuel Kwame Offei said it is therefore of a great service and very heartwarming that the Chinese business community in Ghana would come to engage students and offer jobs.
He hopes that the students who successfully land jobs will work hard and innovate in their work areas and will be a valuable asset to the companies.
