GHC12bn needed to employ backlog of health, educational professionals – Deputy Finance Minister

Deputy Finance Minister, Thomas Nyarko Ampem has revealed that there’s a huge backlog of unemployed professionals in the health and education sectors, a situation he says is affecting the country’s budget.

Mr. Ampem stated that the nation has a backlog of 74,000 health professionals and 71,000 professionals in education who have not yet been hired into the public sector since 2019.

He added that the education sector has similar difficulties, with universities and colleges of education producing between 35,000 and 81,000 graduates a year, but only a small percentage of them are employed by government.

The Minister made these revelations in an interview with Citi FM on Wednesday, October 8, 2025. “If you look at the health sector, every year from 2010 to date, about 26,000 professionals are trained, and out of that, only about 13,000 are recruited annually. Since 2019 to date, we have had a backlog of about 74,000 unemployed health professionals who are waiting to be recruited,” he said.

“There are about 14,000 of them (graduate teachers) who are not employed each year, and we have a backlog of about 71,000 unemployed education professionals,” he said. Although Mr. Ampem acknowledged the severity of the problem, he emphasized that it would take significant financial resources to add all of these professionals to the public payroll.

“If we put the 74,000 health professionals on the payroll, we will need an additional GH₵6 billion annually to absorb them — and another GH₵6 billion for the education sector. This is just for the backlog of professionals who have not been employed,” he noted.