India has urged African countries, including Ghana, to draw lessons from its nationally integrated skills and entrepreneurship model, which now supports more than 4.7 million apprentices and has trained hundreds of thousands of workers in emerging industries.
Speaking with a delegation of African editors in New Delhi, Secretary of India’s Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), Debashree Mukherjee, outlined how the country has built what she called a “comprehensive skilling ecosystem” combining vocational training, apprenticeships and structured entrepreneurship support.
At the heart of the model is a network of approximately 14,500 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) spread across the country, providing practical instruction in trades ranging from manufacturing and engineering to digital technologies. The scale dwarfs comparable infrastructure in most African economies, including Ghana, where technical and vocational institutions remain underfunded and insufficiently linked to industry needs.
India’s National Education Policy 2020 has taken the integration a step further by embedding vocational exposure within the formal school curriculum from as early as Grade Six, alongside internship pathways. Ms. Mukherjee said the deliberate aim is to ensure that skills training is never perceived as a dead end but as a recognised pathway within the broader education system.
The country has also trained over 545,000 candidates in futuristic job roles spanning advanced manufacturing, digital services and other growth sectors, and operates dedicated entrepreneurship institutes supported by blended digital learning platforms.
India-Ghana cooperation in skills and education has been gaining momentum. India has recently launched an academic partnership with Ghana focused on practical skills development, data analysis and entrepreneurship training, with the Indian High Commissioner to Ghana citing capacity building as fundamental to strengthening bilateral ties.
Ms. Mukherjee said India is ready to go further, offering to share its master trainer programmes, centres of excellence and digital course content with West and Central African partners. “We are eager to share insights from India’s skilling journey and explore possible collaborations with Central and West African countries,” she said.
Ghana’s own entrepreneurial ecosystem has been expanding, with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) accounting for 85 percent of all enterprises and contributing around 70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). However, analysts consistently point to a skills mismatch, limited apprenticeship formalisation and weak linkages between education institutions and industry as barriers to stronger job creation and enterprise growth.
India’s experience, officials and observers say, suggests that closing these gaps requires not just isolated interventions but a unified national strategy aligning education, vocational training and entrepreneurship policy under a single framework.
