Development studies is not a “degree to nowhere”—it’s the blueprint for nation-building

Former Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, recently sparked a significant debate when he appeared on the Konnected Minds podcast and branded some university programmes in Ghana as “useless.”

He described these courses as “university degree to nowhere” programmes that fail to prepare graduates for the job market, arguing that universities are prioritising enrolment numbers over national development needs.

During the podcast, Dr. Adutwum cited specific programmes he considers problematic, including the BA in Education (Non-Teaching) at the University of Ghana. However, he began his critique by targeting the very first example: Development Studies, specifically the programme offered at the University for Development Studies (UDS).

I took the time to watch the podcast, and I must admit he said so many great things. He spoke passionately about transformation, about aligning education with national priorities, and about the need for Ghana to chart its own development path. Much in his vision is commendable.

However, I find his mention of development studies, development education, and others needless, quite a contradiction to the very things he sought to transform. He mentioned “development” so many times in his submission: development of the nation, development of the economy, development of human capital, and yet he found its study and education irrelevant, especially for employment. If he had a development education expert in his ministry, the many great things he did in the ministry would not have gone unnoticed. They could have been documented, amplified, and built upon as a coherent national development strategy.

It is this first example, development studies, that I wish to focus on in this article. I will not just defend the programme but argue that a proper understanding of development reveals why Dr. Adutwum’s dismissal of its study is fundamentally misguided and dangerously backward. It confuses tools with architects. It confuses scaffolding with builders.

Let me state the thesis clearly: Development is not about infrastructure. It is not about economics alone. It is not about politics alone. It is not about education alone. Development is the deliberate, systematic engineering of both human beings and social systems.

This is the lens through which we must evaluate every policy, every programme, and every argument about our national progress. And through this lens, the former minister’s critique of development studies collapses entirely.

What is Human Engineering?

Human engineering is about equipping the individual to build their skills, knowledge, character, health, and capabilities. It asks: “What kind of person do we need to build a thriving society?”

This includes education, training, healthcare, parenting, mentorship, and civic education. It is about producing capable, ethical, engaged citizens who can contribute meaningfully to their communities.

What is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is about designing the systems, institutions, laws, norms, and relationships that govern how humans interact. It asks: “What kind of society do we need to enable individuals to thrive?”

This includes governance, policy reform, legal frameworks, cultural change, urban planning, and institutional design. It is about creating an enabling environment where human potential can flourish.

Why Both Are Necessary

Here is the crucial insight: Neither is sufficient alone. Both are necessary. Together, they are developing.

Human engineering without social engineering produces skilled individuals in an unskilled system. You can train ten thousand welders, but if there is no industrial policy that demands welding, they will compete for the same small pool of informal jobs. You can educate thousands of entrepreneurs, but if there is no access to capital, no markets, and no supportive regulations, they will remain micro-entrepreneurs struggling to survive.

Social engineering without human engineering produces well-designed systems that fail because people lack the skills or mindset to use them. You can create a beautiful new market, but if traders are not consulted, if their social networks are ignored, if their daily behaviors are not understood, they will simply refuse to move in. You can pass progressive laws, but if citizens do not know their rights or are too afraid to claim them, those laws remain dead letters.

Development is the marriage of both. You must engineer humans AND engineer the systems they live in. Infrastructure, roads, ports, electricity, and markets are frozen human behavior. A bridge does not create trade; people who trust each other, honor contracts, and negotiate fairly create trade.

A hospital does not create health; people who adopt hygiene, seek preventive care, and follow nutrition plans create health. If you pour concrete without first engineering the human systems that use it, you have not built a nation. You have built an expensive sculpture.

Consider two examples that prove this point perfectly.

First, the Odorna Pedestrian Market in Accra. A modern, organised, pedestrian-friendly market structure was built. Clean stalls. Defined walkways. Roofing. Drainage. By every physical metric, it was an upgrade from the chaotic roadside pavement. And yet, the traders refused to move in. They abandoned it and returned to selling on the pavements by the roadside.

Why? Because the traders were not widgets. They have histories, networks, kinship ties, and daily survival rhythms. They sell in clusters based on ethnicity and product type. They rely on mutual childcare, shared storage, and collective bargaining. They need customers who can grab, pay, and go, not navigate a sterile, unfamiliar structure.

The state is built for bodies, not for behaviors. It engaged in infrastructure development without human engineering or social engineering. It did not understand the traders, their networks, or their needs. It did not design the market to align with their social and economic realities. And the bodies voted with their feet.

Second, the Have Market in Afadzato, South of the Volta Region. A market was constructed—a facility meant to serve as a district commercial hub with thousands of cedis invested. Stalls ready. Roofs intact. Almost two decades later, it is a ghost town with no market activities.

Why? Because markets live or die by movement and trade routes. It may have been geographically convenient on a map, but if the actual flow of goods bypasses it, no amount of beautiful stalls will attract activity. The market was likely sited not because of a thorough socio-economic feasibility study but because of political patronage. It was a ribbon-cutting project, not a livelihood intervention.

The human engineering failure was ignoring the traders’ behaviors, rhythms, and networks. The failure at Odorna was both a human engineering failure and a social engineering failure. The social engineering failure was designing a market that did not align with actual trade flows, market days, or the informal economy’s logic.

A development studies graduate would have told you a market is not a building. It is a living, mobile network of human decisions. Build against that network, and the network will simply move around you.

Now, the former minister argues that we should abandon development studies in favor of TVET and vocational training. But here is the uncomfortable question: We have produced thousands of TVET graduates over the years, carpenters, welders, tailors, masons, and plumbers.

Where are the results? Where are the thriving industries they were supposed to build? Where are the Ghanaian-made furniture brands competing globally? Where are the indigenous construction firms replacing foreign contractors? Why are we still importing basic manufactured goods that our TVET graduates should be producing?

The brutal answer is this: TVET, without the broader context of human and social engineering, produces skilled individuals in an unskilled system. You can train ten thousand welders, but if there is no industrial policy that demands welding, they will compete for the same small pool of informal jobs.

You can train five thousand tailors, but if there is no textile industry, no access to capital, no cooperative organising, and no export strategy, they will remain micro-entrepreneurs stitching the same few designs for subsistence wages because they were only given skills that are partial human engineering.

But we failed to provide access to capital, markets, cooperatives, business development services, and a national industrial policy that is a social engineering failure. We trained individuals, but we did not engineer the ecosystem that makes their skills valuable.

A carpenter without a market is just a person with a tool. A welder without an industry is just a person with a torch. A tailor without a textile sector is just a person with a needle.

The TVET paradox is a social engineering failure dressed as a human engineering success. TVET produces tools. Development Studies produces the system that gives tools meaning and market value. Without the latter, the former is just expensive training for poverty.

And this brings me to the deepest flaw in the former minister’s argument. He assumes that education is about job acquisition. But that assumption itself is a colonial inheritance, not an African tradition.

Before colonialism, education in our societies was about socialisation, character formation, and community contribution. Young people learned through rites of passage, apprenticeships, oral traditions, and participation in communal life. The goal was not to “get a job.” The goal was to become a functioning, respected, and contributing member of the community: a good farmer, a wise elder, a fair chief, a skilled artisan, a trustworthy family member.

Then the colonial masters arrived. They needed local intermediaries, clerks, interpreters, messengers, and low-level administrators. These “educated” Africans were given salaries, status, and proximity to power. The local population observed, “If I learn to read and write English like the clerks, I too can get a salaried job and escape subsistence farming.” Thus, education became instrumentalised – a ticket out of poverty, a means to individual upward mobility, not a tool for collective social advancement.

Independence came, but the colonial mindset remained. Ghanaian parents still say, “Go to school so you can get a good job.” Politicians still measure education by employment rates. Universities are judged by how many graduates find formal employment. The idea that education might be about producing better citizens, critical thinkers, ethical leaders, or community builders is seen as abstract and impractical.

But education is not a factory for employees. It is a workshop for citizens. A society that educates only for jobs will produce technically skilled but socially disengaged citizens, individuals who emigrate for better pay, a culture of competition rather than cooperation, a workforce that follows orders but cannot imagine alternatives, and graduates who see public service as a “job” rather than a “calling.”

A society that educates for social advancement will produce citizens who understand governance, rights, and responsibilities; people who can organise, advocate, and hold leaders accountable; innovators who solve local problems with local solutions; communities that are resilient, self-reliant, cohesive; and a nation that can define its own development path instead of following foreign models. The colonial model gave us clerks. We need nation-builders.

So let us return to the former minister’s claim that development studies is a “degree to nowhere.” The reality is that Development Studies is the only discipline that asks the questions it is afraid to ask. What kind of society are we building? What systems must exist for skills to flourish? How do we move from individual survival to collective prosperity, and how do we engineer capable humans AND engineer the systems they need to thrive?

Development Studies is not about how to lay tarmac. It is about behavioral economics, how to incentivise farmers to adopt new techniques. It is about political sociology: how to build state-citizen trust so tax revenues can fund public goods. It is about public administration – how to engineer a bureaucracy that serves, rather than extorts, the public.

To dismiss this while claiming to care about nation-building is like dismissing anatomy while claiming to be a surgeon. You cannot fix a society without studying how it actually organises, fails, and thrives.

And let us address the jobs question directly. The former minister asked, “What company hires a development studies graduate?” This question misses the entire point of systemic change. A Development Studies graduate does not wait for a company to hire them. They design the microfinance scheme that allows ten thousand petty traders to scale into small businesses. They engineer the community savings group that replaces predatory lenders. They craft the local governance framework that unlocks foreign investment.

They do not fill one job slot. They redesign the ecosystem so that hundreds of job slots spontaneously emerge. Measuring their value by a single job title is like measuring a hydroengineer by whether a power plant hires them, rather than by how many homes the plant electrifies. Development Studies simply creates the conditions for all other jobs to exist.

The former minister also confuses vocational training with education. Vocational training teaches you to operate a machine; that is, human tool use. Development studies teach you to redesign the factory, negotiate with the unions, and fix the supply chain, which is human engineering.

A leader who cannot distinguish between tool-using and system-designing is focused on fixing the car while ignoring the driver’s eyesight, reflexes, and road rage.

Nation-building fails not because of potholes. It fails because of corruption, apathy, poor coordination, and weak institutions, all of which are human and social engineering failures. And Development Studies is the only academic field brave enough to take those failures as its central problem.

History proves this. Japan and Singapore succeeded not because they had better raw materials. They succeeded because they engineered disciplined, educated, and cohesive populations first. The infrastructure came after the human re-engineering. To dismiss development studies is to advocate for building the roof before the foundation. That is not pragmatism. That is a recipe for perpetual underdevelopment.

Odorna and Have Market are not market failures. They are human and social engineering failures. Our TVET graduates are not failures. They are skilled individuals stranded in an unskilled system. The common thread is not a surplus of graduates. It is a deficit of human and social engineering. And until we start treating development as the science of understanding people, not just pouring concrete, we will keep building monuments to our own ignorance.

The colonial masters taught us that education is for jobs. That was convenient for them; they needed clerks, not leaders. But we are no longer a colony. It is time to decolonise our minds and remember: education is for social advancement. It is for building nations. It is for engineering humans who can engineer their own futures.

Development Studies is not the problem. It is the solution we have been too blind to see. If you think development is about steel and cement, you are a contractor. If you know it is about minds and institutions, you are a nation-builder.

The roads will follow only when the minds are ready. Development Studies is the only discipline that takes the readiness of minds seriously. To dismiss it is not pragmatism. It is willful ignorance of how nations are actually built.