taking of steps to improve the economy to provide opportunities to a growing population of young people presents Ghana with a key developmental challenge. • Rapid population growth and declining per capita income --- At the current growth rate of 2.5%, Ghana’s population will increase by 50% within the next 12 years; reach the 30 million mark by 2020 and will be double the 2000 figure by 2028. This rapid growth in the population could present Ghana with a number of developmental challenges especially if economic growth continues to lag behind population growth. • An under-performing agricultural sector --- Ghana’s agricultural sector despite experiencing some improvements in some areas, is seriously underperforming in a number of critical areas. Given that the agricultural sector currently employs 70% of the labour force, contributes close 35% to the GDP and accounts for 57% of foreign exchange earnings, the lack of development in the sector has a number of social and economic implications which could further compound Ghana’s socio-economic problems and retard its developmental efforts • An economy dominated by the agricultural sector with weak under-developed industrial and service sector --- The Ghanaian economy is still predominately agriculture-base without a substantial shift towards the services sector and industrial sector as should be expected if the economy were on a rapid growth path and modernizing. The structure of the Ghanaian economy measured in terms of sectorial contribution to GDP indicates that the structure of the economy changed very little over the last 20 years. Putting in place policies and strategies that modernize the agriculture sector while at the same time target the development of the industrial and services sectors to increase their contribution to the GDP constitute a major developmental challenge facing the country. • The heavy debt burden --- Ghana’s development is being handicapped by the nation’s heavy debt burden measured in terms of: the high national debt per capita, the high national debt as percentage of GDP, the debt service ratio and the debt service to export earnings ratio. The nation’s debt per capita in 2000 was $350 compared to its income per capita of $340; the national debt as percentage of GDP increased to about 129% by 2000. Ghana’s heavy debt burden is compounding its other economic development problems and this is constraining the nation’s developmental efforts in a number of areas. • The disproportionate informal private sector ---- Statistics shows that the private sector, is dominated by its informal sub-sector. In other words, the formal private sector forms a very small fraction of the private sector. The informal private sector is also by far the largest employment sector of the Ghanaian economy – accounting for close to 81% of the economically active population, while the formal private sector accounts for only about 8%. The development of the private sector in general and in particular the formal private sector is one of the major developmental challenges facing the nation. • The low professional, technical and managerial manpower base ---- The occupational profile of the economically active population reveals that: only 8.6% are professional and technical people with a lower percentage of 0.3% who are managers and administrators. It is estimated that Ghana has about 174 registered engineers, 53 legal practitioners, 60 certified accountants, 50 architects and surveyors and 145 medical and detail practitioners (including doctors) per million of persons. The low percentage of key technical and professional manpower highlights the relatively low professional and technically skilled human resource capacity of the economy. The development 17