This was the third successive manifesto led by our team. The project was premised on the assumption that political parties are amenable to inputs into their policies and programmes at its conception stages; the need to make inputs at the manifesto development stage. We held a consultative meeting attended by 60 CSOs to discuss policy proposals into the manifesto. We also received proposals from other CSOs and integrated them into the outcome of the consultative meeting. The final Civil Society Education Manifesto 2020 was launched in May 2020 and shared with the two major political parties in Ghana.
On Tuesday 2nd June 2020, Africa Education Watch led a delegation of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) including ActionAid, World Vision, the SDG4 Platform and the Ghana TVET Coalition to present the Civil Society Education Manifesto 2020 to the Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Hon. Freddie Blay. The Manifesto is an outcome of months of deliberations on policies that require priority attention of Political Parties as they develop their election manifestoes ahead of the December 2020 elections. Over 30 CSOs including Oxfam, Northern Network for Education Development (NNED), Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), Plan Ghana among others partook in the deliberations leading to the development of the manifesto. On their part, the CSOs submitted a list of 40 policy proposals which included a free TVET policy for both the formal and informal sector, extension of free compulsory universal basic education to cover Nursery, increased budgetary allocation to education from 13% to 20% of national budget, the introduction of a local language policy which permits flexibility in instruction by adopting local languages to teach children in the lower primary, especially in indigenous communities, and the scrapping of teacher trainee allowance policy while replacing it with student’s loans and scholarships. Similar presentations were made to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) after which further consultations were held with the Manifesto Committees of the NPP and NDC. Both Party Chairpersons welcomed the policy suggestions and encouraged further engagement with the Education Committee of their respective Parties.
