John Dramani Mahama, the president-elect, is worried about the financial crisis that Ghana’s educational system is currently facing, which affects everything from elementary schools to universities.
The president-elect emphasized that the lack of steady and committed funding is causing serious financial constraints for the entire educational system while speaking to important stakeholders in the field of education.
Mahama says that in order to find a sustainable funding model that can meet the sector’s short- and long-term needs, a consultative forum with all pertinent stakeholders is required to examine potential solutions to the funding problems.
“At the last count, 1.3 million Ghanaian children at the basic level do not have basic furniture to sit and study. And so we have a crisis at the basic level. Even though a lot of money is going to the secondary level, it does not come from a dedicated fund, and there is a lot of waste and inefficiency in the way it is being spent on the Free SHS.
“And then at the same time, tertiary education is also starved of funding because the GETFund that was a good source of funding has been collateralised, and so 60 percent of the GETFund has been spent in advance, and so only 40 percent comes to address infrastructure in the whole educational value chain.
“That is a crisis, and that is why I suggested that we should hold a National Education Review Conference and look at what all the bottlenecks are.”
