French teacher mobility initiative takes off

With the implementation of the French Teacher Mobility (FTM) Program to assist the training of additional French instructors, the Ministry of Education has sped up the teaching of French in the nation.

Under the project, 21 French instructors from across the world have been assigned to institutions that teach French in order to assist their Ghanaian colleagues in their training.

The French teachers would be in the nation for two years, training around 4,000 teachers.

The teachers are from Andorra, Burundi, Cameroun, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Moldova, Rwanda, Serbia, Chad, and Togo, with 10 women and 11 males.

The program, which is being carried out in partnership with the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF), involves 88 countries and administrations.

The OIL created the FTM to suit the demands of member nations who want to commit to a national strategy for high-quality French instruction.

The OIF is spending half a million euros in Ghana’s FTM program to ensure its success.

Ghana was accepted into the FTM program after President Nana Akufo-Addo requested that the Secretary-General of the OIF, Mrs Louise Mushikiwabo, increase the teaching of French.

Dr Yaw Adutwum, the Minister of Education, who launched the initiative in Accra last Tuesday, said Ghana’s strategic location made it critical to take the teaching and study of the French language seriously.

The education minister declared that everything practicable would be done to make teaching and studying the French language simpler for the people, so that Ghanaians could converse effectively in French if they traveled to any French-speaking country in the sub-region or the rest of the globe.

Dr. Adutwum advocated for more of this type of assistance to help enhance French teaching and learning in the country, as it would benefit the country in a variety of ways.

According to him, learning French as a foreign language made excellent commercial, security, and entrepreneurial sense since it would go a long way toward fostering trade contacts and other socio-economic activities that would help the country prosper.

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“Ghana is currently hosting the African Continental Free Trades Area (AfCFTA) centre and as such cannot downplay the importance of the French language if we want to benefit from the operations of other countries,” he said.

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The French Ambassador to Ghana,Mrs Anne Sophie Avé, lauded the government for the effort being made to ensure that the teaching and learning of French in the country was promoted.