Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister of Education, has called on Ghana’s development partners to increase support to the county’s education sector to help halt the worrying human capital projections.
2018 World Bank Report on the county’s Human Capital Index Report on Ghana
The 2018 World Bank Report on Ghana’s human capital Index revealed that nearly 56 percent of Ghana’s human capital would be wasted in the next 18 years. The report attributed this to the poor quality of Ghana’s education system. The report also revealed that just 44% of Ghanaian children of today would become productive when they reach adulthood.
Dr. Adutwum believes an increase in funding from the donor community will help build the robust and right human resources the country needs to facilitate the required transformation of the country.
This was part of his opening remarks with representatives of the country’s development partners in Accra.
This will also help reverse the research findings of the World Bank.
“Education should be seen as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. We are not just training the children, we are training them so that they would be good citizens who will transform the fortunes of our country. We cannot do this without the support of development partners, we can’t. You have supported us over the years and I am calling on you to do more with me,” he said.
Present at the meeting were representatives from World Bank, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UNESCO, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), previously known as DFID, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the French Embassy and USAID.
Ghana’s development partners are assisting the country in varied ways to improve the country’s education sector in the areas of access to education, quality, and accountability within the sector.
The development partners also help in the development of textbooks, digital learning, reading initiatives as well as improvement of school management.
Others facilitate the countries education in the areas of Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education.
The sector minister called on partners to assist him and the country to attain the desired quality in the education sector.
“There is so much ahead of us and the opportunity is tremendous.
“We can’t talk about the transformation of this country when our Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio is 18.8 percent,” he said and added that “if that number does not go up, we are not going to get there”.
However, Dr. Adutwum assured the stakeholders of the education ministry using the indicators to improve on education among others.
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“So our team is going to review that report. We have already requested to meet with the World Bank statistics group to walk us through every indicator that is in there, …I want us to change this,” he said.