2023 Budget Statement: disturbing matters arising for education -Kofi Asare

The government of Ghana’s 2023 budget statement read to parliament outlined the government’s proposed activities within the education sector for the year 2023.

Kofi Asare of EduWatch has outlined the Matters arising for education as captured by the 2023 budget.

He writes…

One million Ghanaian children have never set foot in basic school, mainly because there are no public basic schools to provide free basic education in many communities.

The solution is not far-fetched; build more public basic schools in underserved communities.

Statistically, we need 1,800 schools to accommodate the 1 million out-of-school children yet to taste an education.

Paragraph 762 of the 2023 Budget Statement among others reads, ..’ the Ministry completed and handed over 40 basic school infrastructural projects in 2022.

Ghana has 261 districts. This means an average of 0.15 schools per district, per year.

Going by the Finance Ministers’ own data, even if we hold the out-of-school children population constant, it may take 45 years to provide access infrastructure to the 1 million children.

…and this even excludes the burden of renovating or building school infrastructure to replace the existing 5,000 plus schools taking place under trees, sheds etc.

READ: Allow public schools to run their end-of-term examination in peace – GES told

I pray the data is inaccurate, else, this is not a great story. We must up our game in 2023 via GEFFund.

Team Eduwatch will release a preliminary response to the 2023 education budget on Monday.

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More anon!

Kofi Asare
Eduwatch
[email protected]