GHANA-EDUCATION: Ambitious Plans Versus Harsh Reality

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Edward Ameyibor

ACCRA, Oct 26 1996 (IPS) - Plans by Ghana’s government to have every child of school age in school by the year 2010 could be stymied by the poverty that keeps many children out of the education system.

Improving education and access to it is the aim of a 40-million dollar project run by the Ministry of Education with financial assistance from the World Bank and the U.S, British, Danish and Japanese development aid agencies.

According to the Education Ministry, the money will be used, among other things, to build more schools, provide learning aids, print textbooks, provide bicycles and accomodation for rural teachers while making water and sanitation facilities available for all schools.

The project also aims to ensure that, by the year 2010, all children of school age will receive an education, thereby reversing a trend of decreasing enrolment rates in Ghana’s schools.

In 1980, the gross attendance rate was 80 percent in primary schools and 41 percent in secondary schools, according to the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). By 1992, the rates were 76 and 36 percent in primary and secondary schools respectively.

The Education Ministry has described the project, which starts next year and runs until 2010, as “ambitious but achievable”.

But, says Emmanuel Ahinakwa, a pastor, “it is doubtful if it could eliminate child labour or street children altogether. Other projects will be needed to eliminate poverty.”

A 1992-93 survey by the Social Welfare Department showed that 15 percent of children in Ghana, most of them girls aged 10 to 14 years, worked without pay in family businesses, mainly in the sales and services sector, but also on farms.

In 1992, gross enrolment in primary schools was 70 percent for girls and 83 percent for boys, while the rates in secondary schools were 28 and 44 percent respectively, according to UNESCO.

Another 11 percent of children in Ghana work for wages, with the best paid earning about 2,000 cedis (roughly 1.12 U.S. dollars) a day, whereas the daily minimum wage is 2,750 cedis (around 1.17 U.S. dollars).

In many cases, the children migrate to big towns and cities from where they periodically send money home to their parents or other relatives, especially the girls.

The degree to which children work to help their families varies. In some cases, as in big market towns like Techiman in North Central Ghana or Asesewa in the Eastern region, classrooms are deserted by pupils on market days.

“The children go to help the market mammies in carting their goods or stay behind their wares while they do something else,” says Peter Acheampong of the Ghana Education Service.

“I know of a school where a teacher reprimanded a boy for absenting himself and the boy pulled out a wad of cedi notes and showed to the teacher asking ‘if I had been here, would I have got this’,” Acheampong recalls.

In other cases, parents simply withdraw the children from school, which is what Mallam Haruna Issaka did to his 15-year-old son Yahya. When told that depriving his child of an education would expose him to a life of suffering as an adult, Issaka retorted angrily: “Am I suffering? He can be a driver like me.”

For Accra resident Kwame Adu, “it is the economic situation that is causing this problem.”

But Grace Asante, a teacher, dismisses that argument. She feels that it has more to do with the fact that many people do not plan their families. “Nobody believed things would change so drastically in this country, so people took pride in having many children,” she argues. “They are today paying the price for their recklessness. It is a burden they have to bear.”

According to the survey, almost 90 percent of the children on Accra’s streets do not attend school at all. Two-thirds of them are boys.

“The parents of many of them do not even know their children are not in school, while others deliberately take them out to help feed the family,” said Asante.

According to social welfare officer Joseph Ankrah, many of the children on the streets are products of broken homes or live away from one or both parents. “My worry is about those parents who send their children to work to help feed them and other members of the family like this boy,” he told IPS, pointing to a child standing beside him.

The child, a nine-year old called Sammy, was referred to his office by the police after they took him in for questioning in connection with goods that went missing at the Accra market.

After the child led Ankrah to his father, Nii Kotey Nikoi, the social worker asked the man, a cobbler, why he allowed his son to be a cart pusher at the market instead of sending him to school.

Ankrah told IPS the answer he got was: “What my son would gain out of school would benefit him alone not all of us. He has many brothers and sisters, you know.”