Team Eduwatch has met with the Minister for Education for an executive briefing on key findings from monitoring the 2022 WASSCE for Ghana students. The meeting was key to securing government's commitment to strengthening the assessment system amidst recurring reports of question leakages and exams centre fraud.

Further discussions were held on issues of education financing and secondary education reforms. Team Eduwatch shared copies of the Education Financing Brief which was launched at the just ended Education Financing Conference.

The minister committed to continue working towards serialization, e-testing and activity based assessment as long term solutions to exams fraud, while pursuing Eduwatch’s recommendation for a regulatory body for external assessment in Ghana.

The 2022 WASSCE Ghana Monitoring report will be launched on Thursday 27th October, 2022 at 2:00 PM on our official Facebook page - @AfricaEduWatch.

© Africa Education Watch

On Tuesday October 18, Eduwatch held its maiden Education Financing Conference at the Kofi Annan ICT Centre. The Conference was aimed at improving domestic resource mobilization to support accountable and equitable investment in education, while promoting spending efficiency for improved learning outcomes for all learners.

Mr. Alexis Asuinura, the Financial Controller of GETFund, made a presentation on the allocation, disbursement, utilization, monitoring and accountability systems of GETFund, while explaining the rationale behind the capping and partial securitization of GETFund, which has led to declining inflows and a high debt service obligation which constituted 60% of GETFund allocation in 2021. The keynote speaker for the conference, Mr. Charles Tsegah called for a national stakeholder discussion on spending efficiency in education financing.

Presenting the findings of Eduwatch's 2022 Education Financing Policy Brief (which was launched at the Conference), the Executive Director of Eduwatch, Mr. Kofi Asare highlighted trends in resource allocation to education and inequity in resource distribution among pre-teriary sub-sectors of the education sector.

A panel and plenary discussion that followed the presentations advanced the need for government to uncap GETFund and develop a framework to ensure equitable resource distribution among the sub-sectors of pre-tertiary education taking into consideration gender, socio-economic, and rural-urban dimensions.

The Education Financing Conference is part of several activities being implemented by Eduwatch with support from Oxfam to promote government investment in education. Participants were drawn from State institutions, Civil Society and the media.

The conference was chaired by Madam Dorothy Konadu, Board member of Eduwatch.


© Africa Education Watch

The Executive Director of EduWatch Ghana, Kofi Asare, says government must adapt cost efficient methods in expanding access to secondary education in Ghana other than the boarding system if it is to reach universal secondary education by 2030.

According to him, calls for a cost-efficient new approach is not to hinder the government’s Free Senior High School policy, but rather a call to rethink the country’s unhealthy obsession towards the traditional boarding system which is far more expensive to manage.

He explained that due to the expensive boarding system at the secondary school level, whenever there is an attempt to expand access to secondary education, it negatively impacts the basic education system depriving the base of essential funds to operate.

Describing the relationship between secondary education and basic education as an inverse one, he noted that till a sustainable solution is reached, the quality of basic education in the country will suffer.

“Well, education is an input-output relationship, the quality of your input including of course supervision determines to a large extent, the quality of your output. And so if you invest little and you monitor or supervise poorly obviously you’ll churn out low quality.

“According to UNICEF for instance, only 7% of children in grade 3 can read grade appropriate text well in Ghana, so only 7% of children in grade 3 can read as expected of a grade 3 child in Ghana. It tells you that there are critical foundational issues,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express.

Kofi Asare explained that the prevailing issues further buttress the point that there is a declining investment in basic education.

Speaking on findings from research conducted by his organization, he revealed that investment into basic education began decreasing from 2011.

“In 2011 for instance we were committing close to about half of the education budget to basic education, about 47% and it started declining since then. In 2012 we committed close to 8% of the GDP of Ghana to education that was when we were doing a lot… but the number of pupils has increased in line with population growth and the demand for education.

“Now if you look at the basic input indicators at the school level, we have huge infrastructure deficits. If the class room environment is not interesting, children will not be happy to learn. 40% of children in basic schools do not have access to desks, according to the Ministry of Education, that is not our data.

“When you have over 5000 of your basic schools taking place under trees and sheds and dilapidated structures where the slightest sight of rain means that school is closing down, it means that the school environment is not conducive for learning.”

He stated that while the national teacher-student ratio paints a rosy picture of 15 students to one teacher, suggesting a teacher surplus in the country, the situation on the ground is far from what is recorded.

“Apart from that there still are classrooms without teachers. Our research suggests that there are about 5000 primary school classrooms that do not have teachers in the deprived part of this country even though we seem to have a teacher surplus at the national level.

“If you look at pupil-teacher ratio data it looks so beautiful that almost every 15 students in Junior High School have one teacher. But there are schools that you’ll go you’ll see two teachers handling the whole Junior High School 1-3 so the input situation also has not been equitably distributed.”

He further stated that due to the insufficient investment into the basic and secondary education system, it has created an inverse relationship where often basic education suffers insufficient funding while government tries to improve secondary school access.

“So anytime you’re spending more on secondary, basic comes down and vice versa. That is why we are saying that this is not just about the free senior high school thing. In 2011 government was spending almost 3 times more on every secondary school child than basic education. So it is not that free senior high school has suddenly made secondary education expensive that is not the case.

“The point we’re making is that if we are to pursue the target of universal secondary education by 2030, we need to adapt cost efficient methods or approaches in expanding access to secondary education other than the boarding system where feeding alone is an albatross around government’s neck.

“And so we must begin to rethink the obsession towards this traditional boarding system which has made our secondary education system so expensive that anytime we attempt to expand access to secondary education it affects the raw material base that is basic education.”

Source: myjoyonline.com

The Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch) has revealed in its latest ‘Education Financing Brief’ that Ghana spends three times more education resources on children from the richest 20 percent of households than it does on those from the poorest 20 percent of households.

According to Eduwatch, while a whopping 33 percent of the sector’s resources go to these richest 20 percent, only 11 percent gets to the poorest 20 percent of households.

The civil society organisation (CSO) has called for a strengthened commitment to improving education financing and increasing equitable spending to create more opportunities for the majority of poor who are out of school or at risk of dropping out.

The Executive Director of Eduwatch, Kofi Asare, mentioned that also worrying is the deprivation of the Complementary Education Agency (CEA), with the budgetary allocation to perform its mandate. The CEA is mandated to provide complementary education for basic school-aged Out-Of-School-Children (OOSC) in the country. The current number is about 418,000 children.

“The Complementary Education Agency (CEA) mandated to provide complementary education for OOSC is woefully underfunded, receiving a maximum of 0.32 percent of the sector’s expenditure in 2020. The CEA requires at least two percent of total education expenditure to deliver on its complementary education mandate under the new CEA Law,” he stated.

The recently ended Transforming Education Summit (TES) reinforced the need to target education spending at the poorest quantile to ensure equity and efficiency in spending by meeting the comprehensive needs of poor people as they access education.

Declining growth in education expenditure

The contraction of the Ghanaian economy due to COVID-19 and its impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is negatively affecting the government’s spending on education.

In 2020, even though Ghana exceeded the international benchmark of 15-20 percent public expenditure allocation to education, education expenditure as a percent of total government expenditure declined from 23 percent in 2019 to 17.6 percent in 2020.

The Eduwatch indicated that between 2017 and 2020, the average education expenditure as a percentage of GDP was 4.8 percent. This is a decline of one percent from 5.6 percent to 4.6 percent.

“Even though Ghana’s GDP more than doubled from GH₵180billion in 2015 to GH₵391billion in 2020, education expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, declined by almost two percent from 6.5 percent to 4.6 percent. This means investment in education is not consistent with the growth of the economy,” Eduwatch stated.

The decline in basic education expenditure

Basic education’s share of total education expenditure has declined from 47 percent in 2011 to 41 percent in 2020.

According to UNICEF, the government spends three times more to provide Senior High School (SHS) education for each child per year – Gh₵3,633 compared to basic Gh₵1,251.

In 2022, out of a total of GH₵1.4billion allocated for infrastructure, only 16 percent was allocated to basic education, with the highest 44 percent going to secondary education, and tertiary education 40 percent.

GETFund is too focused on secondary education to the detriment of basic. This is widening the infrastructural gap in basic education as there remain over 5,000 schools under trees, sheds, and in dilapidated structures; and 4,000 primary schools without a JHS, leading to about 20 percent dropouts in deprived communities after primary school.

The Eduwatch recommends that the government should leverage existing Ghana Statistical Services (GSS) data on household expenditure to develop a targetting system that enables the average to rich households to pay for feeding in SHS while the poorest receive even more support to remove existing financial barriers in funding their school prospectus.

Again, the CSO is urging the government to upscale education spending to the upper thresholds of recommended global thresholds, thus allocating at least 20 percent of government spending and six percent of GDP to education, with 50 percent going into basic education.

Source: thebftonline.com

On Thursday October 13, Eduwatch participated in the launch of the Gender Rights and Empowerment Programme (G-REP), being implemented by STAR-Ghana Foundation (one of our key partners) with funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO). The programme seeks to contribute to improved access to social and political rights of women and girls, by supporting 18 CSOs to take up various community and national based advocacies and initiatives, with in partnership with key government institutions.

Eduwatch is implementing phase three of the Securing Educational Rights of Vulnerable teenage girls in COVID-19 Era (SERVE III) as part of G-REP. SERVE III will support the MoGCSP, MoE and GES to strengthen girls re-entry and child marriage response systems, while advocating the financing and implementation of government’s Complementary Basic Education Policy by the CEA, to reduce out of school children.

The launch was chaired by the Deputy Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, with representation from FCDO, the Parliamentary Select Committees for Education, Social Protection and Health, ministries and states agencies, as well as CSO partners and the media.

© Africa Education Watch