President-elect John Dramani Mahama has expressed deep concern over the ongoing funding crisis plaguing Ghana’s education system, affecting everything from basic schools to tertiary institutions.
During a recent engagement with key education stakeholders, Mahama emphasized that the entire educational framework is grappling with significant financial limitations, largely due to the lack of consistent and dedicated funding.
The President-elect called for a consultative forum with all relevant parties to discuss solutions and develop a sustainable funding model that can meet both the immediate and long-term needs of the education sector.
“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.”
