Market Indicators
Global Spotlight on Ghana
ONE OF AFRICA’S SAFEST AND MOST STABLE COUNTRIES, GHANA IS SEEING SIGNIFICANT GROWTH — AND AS A RESULT IS NEEDING SIGNIFICANT TALENT “Ghana needs all of us here in this room,” Dr Mark Ankrah, managing director of the country’s State Housing Corporation, told Ghanaian expatriate and diaspora professionals at last month’s Ghana Careers Fair in London. “The key word for me today is ‘opportunity’,” he said. The opportunity: swapping dreary, downtrodden Britain for something more dynamic, making a difference to Ghana and advancing your career in a less crowded market. In terms of individual opportunities, the conference heard, there are plenty and in numerous sectors. “Africa has a role to play in the world,” Roland Agambire, the chief executive officer of Ghanaian telco firm RLG Communications, told the conference earlier in the day. Optimism, pride and that rhetoric of ‘making a difference’ were certainly important — beyond which there is a very practical aspect. “We’ve got to learn from what we have taken from the best, which is what we’ve got here [in the UK],” Agambire continued; talent offering skills honed abroad to Ghana are highly prized. Some of the country’s thirst for talent will be due to previous brain drain. But when Recruiter asks Sampson Dontoh, the HR director for West Africa at FMCG giant Unilever, if this is still a problem, he laughs. “The brain drain was about 10 years ago,” he says. “With the economy picking up, that has gone down quite drastically.” A bigger concern for Dontoh is the quality of Ghana’s graduates — he works directly with universities to better orientate teaching to business needs. “They are doing very well at progressing on this,” he says. “I think it is going to pay off in a couple of years.” Meanwhile, Maxwell Donkor, one of three founders of mobile job matching service mPawa, is focusing on the lower-skilled end of the market. The trio developed mPawa realising “that most
WHERE THE JOBS ARE
Views of Ghana Ghana’s capital Accra was named the fourth best place in the world to mix business and pleasure by the New York Times earlier this year. “Mobile technology is taking over the African market and Ghana is no different. Many persons in Ghana and Africa are mobile-first and probably will remain mobile-only.” Maxwell Donkor, cofounder, mPawa Among the major global firms, Randstad.com shows four jobs in Ghana as Recruiter went to press, but there is no other evidence of the bigger recruiters making their move. Depending on which data is used, Ghana is around 85th in the global ranking of economies by overall GDP, and 140th per capita.
artisans [blue-collar workers] in Africa don’t have written records of their work history, or any way to keep track of their work experiences”. While most tech innovations in Ghana have benefited the white-collar space, Donkor tells Recruiter, his will focus mainly on manpower in industries including agriculture, construction and hospitality. Alongside such tech innovation, “the demand for recruitment agencies has increased”, says Rachel Quarcoo of Accra-based agency Careers in Ghana, “and more agencies are springing up each day”. The agencies are becoming more sophisticated, she adds, and “now make a critical contribution to the training and development of employees”. She suggests better partnering with internal HR teams around succession planning and talent management is due to come next. And there is room for more agencies, be it on the ground or working remotely in the market. Sarah Fitzgerald, a director of UK-based recruitment firm Executives in Africa, says that with a relative lack of agencies for the roles they recruit, her candidates “are hugely flattered when they get a call through from a UK international search firm”. Fitzgerald describes the firm’s approach in Ghana as “mini search”, saying that headhunting “normally wouldn’t be cost effective” at the management levels they recruit for, especially given that much higher salaries and therefore margins can be seen in the nearby rival economy of Nigeria. Those salaries will rise in time, and more agencies will look to the market and perhaps office space in Accra. And as the country’s oil industry continues to grow, the brain drain will continue its emphatic shift into reverse gear. SPONSORED BY
SAM BURNE JAMES sam.burnejames@recruiter.co.uk
REGIONAL LEADER
Projected average job openings per firm, 2009-13 Sector
Jobs per firm
Agriculture
60
Business process outsourcing
45
Banking and financial services
39
Artisan [blue collar]
34
Logistics
20
Industry/manufacturing
16
Trade/retail
13
Construction
9
Textiles and garment making
8
Import/export
8
Advisory/consulting
6
The Youth Employment Network and The International Youth Foundation’s ‘Private Sector Demand for Youth Labour in Ghana and Senegal’ (2009)
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Tertiary education enrolment rate (%) (World Economic Forum 2011)
Mobile phone subs per 100 population
GDP growth rate (%) 2011
(World Economic Forum 2011)
(World Bank 2011)
Labour force participation rate (%) 2011 (World Bank 2011)
NO. 1 QUALITY
71.5
75 60
FINANCIAL & ADMINISTRATIVE
55.1 54
47.6
45
42.8
45.7
SUPPORT AS AFFIRMED BY OUR AWARD-WINNING CLIENTS
30 15 0
8.6 10.1 6.3
■ Ghana
14.4 7.4
4.7
01 260 280 290 www.backofficesupportservices.co.uk
■ Nigeria
■ Sub-Saharan Africa RECRUITER
JULY 2013
17
11/07/2013 08:49