Information gathered by this portal indicates that one student and one tablet will cost the country at least Ghs 3000 per student and a whopping 5.2 billion in the first year of the project under the SMART Schools project.
You have to ask yourself: which developed countries offer free tablets for their college students, even at their high levels of digitalization? The likes of the US, Argentina, Kenya (and Rwanda), and Peru are a few countries that have tried something like this with lower numbers and given out less fancied tablets to lower-level learners.
Officially, each class at the SHS should have 40 students. This means the government will incur a cost of GHS 3000 x 40 students per class, which amounts to 120,000 GHS.
With a projected 1.3 million students in SHS targeted to receive these tablets, the country will be spending a total of GHS3,900,000,000 (Ghs3.9 billion).
Assuming there are an equal number of students in all three classes or levels at the secondary school, the tablets will cost 1,300,000,000 (GHS 1.3 billion).
This implies that the government must allocate a minimum of Ghs5.2 billion over the next 12 months, which includes Ghs3.9 billion for the current SHS1 to SHS3 students in school and an additional Ghs1.3 billion for those currently in JHS3 preparing for their BECE exams in July. All this excludes the main free SHS policy costs to be incurred.
While the government is ready to spend this scarce resource on free tablets for SHS students, the same schools and those in the lower levels do not have the same basic infrastructure.
We may sing glorious songs about the political choices that led to One Student, One Tablet, but the truth remains that, as a nation, our leaders have failed to allocate and use scarce resources efficiently to deal with problems confronting education in Ghana.
- There have been no textbooks for schools since the introduction of the new curriculum, schools have not had textbooks.
- Many basic schools in Ghana lack high-quality and humanely friendly classrooms and school infrastructure.
- There are no quality and nutritious meals for elementary and secondary school students.
- Under resourcing of schools, especially at the basic school level.
Let’s face it: the cost of a tablet for a single class can address approximately half of the furniture problems in many of our schools.
While the country is struggling, our leaders seem to find money and mismanage it by investing it in freebies with the hope of winning political favours from beneficiaries in the form of votes.
We are already struggling to fund the Free SHS due to significant obstacles in areas such as food and nutrition, accommodation, and furniture. We are now adding to the same cost; we are unable to take care of at least GHS 1.3 billion every year from 2024. Currently, if the government is to provide all students with free SHS, Ghana will have to cough up Ghs3.9 billion to buy 1.3 million tablets.
Why not invest this same money into some form of job-creating business for the youth and employ them? The world is currently constantly on the internet; the government should begin to think about how it can leverage IT to create jobs and not merely spend difficult-to-come-by resources on freebies.
READ: What is Propelling the Global Trend on Online Education and Learning?
Indeed, we have cash in Ghana, but we mismanage it, with projects such as One Student, One Tablet. This project means that the government will have to provide tablets to all fresh SHS students each year. Soon, people in leadership positions at all levels through the value chain of this one student and one table end up engaging in massive stealing, which will surely shoot up the cost and lead to lost resources and debt for the nation.
