Design & Technology Institute
Youth Empowerment
Strategic Communication
LMIS Breakfast Meeting
Labour Market Information Systems are not headline news. The technical nature of LMIS—how governments collect, manage, and deploy labour market data to inform policy, training, and employment strategies—means the subject tends to circulate within specialist circles rather than reaching the broader public and institutional audiences that need to be engaged if real policy change is to follow.
DTI and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs partnered to examine the current state of LMIS in Ghana and explore global alternatives and models that could inform a Ghanaian approach. The breakfast meeting was designed to convene three sectors—academia, the private sector, and the Government of Ghana—around a research agenda with direct implications for labour market policy, TVET, and employment creation.
The communications challenge was to generate serious media coverage for a technically complex policy subject from a breakfast meeting rather than a major public event and to do so on a shoestring budget.
What We Did
Mech Consult provided event support, stakeholder management, and media relations for the breakfast meeting, managing participation, logistics, and coverage as integrated workstreams.
Stakeholder management ensured that the right representatives from academia, the private sector, and government attended, aligning participation with the research objectives of the DTI-SIPA partnership. The convening function — bringing these three sectors into a single space for a focused policy dialogue — required careful coordination to secure commitments from decision-makers whose time and priorities are stretched across competing institutional demands.
On media relations, we identified and engaged the appropriate outlets for a policy research audience, developed the communications materials that gave journalists the context they needed to cover a technical subject accessibly, managed media accreditation and on-the-day coverage, and conducted post-event monitoring, clipping, and reporting. The Columbia University SIPA partnership gave the story international academic credibility.
The Outcome
22 publications were recorded against a target of 6 — a compliance rate of 366.7%. 16 of the 22 stories were unsolicited. On a subject as technical as labour market information systems, that unsolicited rate is a direct measure of how effectively the story was positioned.
Coverage appeared in tier-one media (print, radio and TV). 17 online publications with an estimated total audience reach of 1.93 million.
Earned media was estimated at GHC 37,179.01. The breakfast demonstrated a specific Mech Consult capability: making technically complex policy subjects newsworthy to national media, in formats and through relationships that produce measurable results.
