FON Packaging Ventures moves to bridge graduate-industry gap

FON Packaging Ventures, one of Ghana’s leading carton manufacturers, has launched a structured internship initiative designed to transition engineering students from the lecture hall to the factory floor.

Through a five-year partnership with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), which has already seen more than 500 packaging technology students tour its Accra facility, the company is challenging Ghana’s industrial sector to transform corporate goodwill into a shared national obligation.

The BSc Packaging Technology students moved through live production lines, examined industrial machinery and witnessed first-hand how packaging is engineered at scale.

Management believes the initiative will help ensure local engineering talent is absorbed into the domestic economy rather than left underutilised.

Each year, Ghana’s universities produce a steady stream of qualified packaging engineers, yet many never enter the industry for which they were trained.

Industrial Liaison Officer at KNUST, Kwadwo Boadu, described the collaboration as integral to the curriculum.

“This is a great part of the curriculum that we are running at KNUST, and we see FON as a very good partner — a partner we can always rely on. When students come to the field, things become real. The skills and knowledge demonstrated by the FON team have always been excellent. It helps our students understand what we are teaching and sharpens their practical skills,” Mr. Boadu said.

For Emmanuel Osei Ntim, who leads FON Packaging Ventures, the problem is structural and routinely misdiagnosed.

“Ghana does not have a training problem. We have a handoff problem. We produce capable engineers every year, then leave them stranded at the doorstep of an industry that never opens the door. If manufacturers keep waiting for someone else to fix that, nothing changes. We would rather be the bridge than complain about the gap,” he said.

That conviction is now evolving into a formal programme. FON Packaging Ventures has announced a structured internship initiative designed to take packaging students beyond one-day factory visits into sustained, hands-on industrial training.

The programme will place students within live production and quality operations for an extended period, pairing them with experienced FON engineers and technicians so classroom theory can be translated into real industrial competence before graduation rather than years later.

Mr. Ntim is now calling on Ghana’s manufacturers, industry associations and tertiary institutions to treat structured industrial placement as a shared national obligation rather than an act of corporate goodwill.

The challenge he sets out is practical: every factory with a production line capable of training a student should commit to doing so, and every packaging and engineering faculty should be matched with an industrial partner.

A competitive manufacturing future, he argues, will not be built on the talent Ghana exports or wastes, but on the talent it deliberately retains, trains and absorbs at home.

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