Understanding school-to-work transitions for work-boundyouth: a multi-stakeholder study of post-secondary employmentpathways in Accra, Ghana

Thesis

This thesis examines the school-to-work transitions of work-bound school-leavers in Accra, Ghana, within a labour market characterised by widespread informality, limited formal job creation, and weak institutional transition support. While dominant transition frameworks often assume linear progression from schooling into stable employment, the thesis shows that post-secondary transitions for non-tertiary youth in urban Ghana are fragmented, iterative, and shaped by structural constraint, relational access, and everyday coping strategies.

The study adopts a qualitative, multi-stakeholder research design based on in-depth interviews with unemployed and employed youth, employers, and employment services practitioners across the urban sectors of hospitality, construction, and manufacturing. It examines how young people enter, experience, and navigate informal employment, and how schooling, skills, social networks, and institutions interact to shape labour market outcomes.

The findings show that informal employment constitutes the dominant terrain of post-school transition, functioning simultaneously as an entry point, a coping mechanism, and, for some, a prolonged holding pattern. Secondary schooling is widely perceived as weakly aligned with labour market realities, offering limited preparation for work-readiness competencies, workplace culture, or entry-level expectations. Access to work is mediated primarily through informal social networks rather than formal employment services, producing uneven opportunities and reproducing existing inequalities. Institutional actors intended to support transition play a limited role, reinforcing reliance on self-navigation within unregulated labour markets. Gender, class, geography, and social capital intersect to shape diverse, unequal, and reversible transition pathways.

The thesis contributes empirically to youth employment scholarship in Ghana and theoretically to school-to-work transition debates by challenging policy and analytical frameworks that continue to privilege linear progression, formal sector endpoints, and institutionally mediated pathways, despite the enduring centrality of informal and hybrid work in urban labour markets. It advances a contextualised framework that centres youth agency within structurally constrained environments and foregrounds the relational, informal, and affective character of transition in African urban labour markets.

Authors: Edudzie, EK

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gwj17om44
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: employment services; work-readiness; Accra; Ghana; employability; school-to-work transitions; school-leavers; work-bound youth; secondary education; youth employment; social capital; informal employment; institutional mediation; labour market informality
• Subjects: Informal sector (Economics)--Developing countries; Labor market; Youth--Employment; Education; High school graduates--Employment; Sociology; Employability; Educational sociology; Ghana; Accra; School-to-work transition