President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, has questioned the economic merit of some flagship job creation programmes introduced by President John Dramani Mahama’s administration.

Assessing President John Dramani Mahama’s first 120 Days in office on Channel One TV’s ‘The Big Issue’ on Saturday, May 10, he argued that initiatives such as Adwumawura, One Million Coders, and the National Apprenticeship Programme appear to be rushed efforts with weak links to economic productivity.

He cautioned against what he described as a pattern of launching high-cost programmes without sufficient evaluation of their potential impact on the economy.

Franklin Cudjoe posits that while job creation is necessary, it must significantly feed back into the country’s economy.

“I take a critical look at the promise like the launch of Adwumawura, One Million Coders, National Apprenticeship Programme, there again I see opportunities to basically splurge money without necessarily having done a proper analysis of what these interventions will add to the productivity of the economy.

“You don’t just create jobs because you think you want to give people jobs to do. You want to give meaningful jobs that would feed back into certain aspects of the value chain of the economy.

“That is where we should be right now. We should have that clean bridge between ‘people are idling about so let’s give them jobs and before you realise we are spending close to GH₵200 million on the Adwumawura, One Million Coders, National Apprenticeship Programme bit more that you can’t see the synergy what they are going to do in the economy,” he said.