Re-Imagine Ghana with Dr. H. Aku KWAPONG: Project surge

Education must become the country’s most urgent national project in the next 10 years.

These are tough times in a nation’s life when its education system fails to turn out stellar performance, while politicians argue over the obvious.

I want to run Project SURGE for the sake of our children and I wish the entire nation yearned for such as well – a project that provides Sustained & Urgent Reformation of Ghana’s Education – that’s what I call it. SURGE for 10 damn years we cannot afford to miss.

I believe Ghana’s education system is failing in ways that are no longer merely disappointing but existential. The country is producing generations of young people without the cognitive tools required to compete in a modern economy or sustain a stable democracy. This is not a cyclical problem. It is a structural crisis born from deep, long-running patterns. If Ghana does not intervene with scale and seriousness, it will not simply fall behind; it will create a workforce incapable of driving national development.

The failures we see today did not begin with WASSCE 2023 or 2024. They began in decisions made two decades ago, and those decisions have compounded, year after year, until the system now resembles a pipeline designed for mass academic decay. Understanding the crisis requires understanding the three structural drivers at the heart of it.

Teacher Quality: A Profession Rebuilt from the Wrong End of the Talent Spectrum

In successful education systems, teaching is a high-prestige, high-selectivity profession. South Korea recruits from the top third of university graduates. Estonia requires most general education teachers to complete a five-year Master’s degree, and admission into these programs is competitive. Malaysia’s international schools now attract globally trained educators as the norm, raising standards across the board.

Ghana’s trajectory could not be more different. For decades, teaching has been the default route for students who did not qualify for university admission. Instead of teaching being a destination for the most capable, it became the absorption point for those least prepared for demanding academic work. This was not malicious; it was a supply-side compromise in a country facing chronic teacher shortages. But compromise, repeated over twenty years, becomes destiny.

Weak cohorts became teachers. Those teachers produced weaker cohorts. Those cohorts re-entered teaching. The downward spiral is visible in every WASSCE script and every classroom where conceptual misunderstanding is handed down like an heirloom. A system cannot generate problem solvers when its teaching profession is built from the academic bottom.

Overcrowding: Student–Teacher Ratios That Make Real Learning Impossible

The second driver is sheer volume. Ghana’s schools are not structured for learning; they are structured for mass throughput. Prempeh College, with its 4,500 students and roughly 20.5 students per teacher, is not unusual. It is typical.

The country’s top schools tell the same story:

• Kumasi SHS: approximately 5,700 students
• Opoku Ware: approximately 4,800
• PRESEC Legon: approximately 4,300
• Louis SHS: approximately 3,900
• Tamale SHS: approximately 3,800

These are not schools. They are educational municipalities. The student–teacher ratios commonly exceed 20:1, often 25:1 or worse. Compare this to the global benchmarks:

Eton: 8 students per teacher.

Phillips Academy Andover: 7 students per teacher.

Estonia’s basic schools: typically 12–15 students per class, with additional specialist staff.

High-performing systems treat adult attention as the essential currency of learning. Ghana’s system treats it as a luxury. Overcrowding converts classrooms into arenas of survival, not development. Students memorize because teachers cannot afford to teach. Reasoning collapses because there is no time to cultivate it.

Subject Mastery in Senior High School: A Critical Weak Link

Senior high school is where the intellectual foundation of the future workforce is built. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, and literature are not subjects that can be taught by generalists. They require teachers with deep disciplinary grounding. Without it, students never form conceptual frameworks—only fragments of memorized content.

Estonia mandates advanced degrees for this exact reason. South Korea structures teacher training around rigorous subject mastery. Ghana operates in the opposite direction. Many SHS teachers lack the subject-specific academic depth required to build reasoning skills. The consequences now appear in the staggering WASSCE numbers:

• 220,008 failed Core Mathematics
• 161,606 failed Integrated Science
• 131,097 failed English Language
• 196,727 failed Social Studies

These failures are not student failures. They are teacher preparation failures, multiplied across thousands of classrooms for more than two decades.

A Deeper National Failure: We refused to invest at the scale required

Behind these drivers is a simple truth: Ghana expanded access without investing in quality. Classrooms did not expand. Laboratories did not expand. Libraries did not expand. Teacher preparation did not improve. Meanwhile, enrollment ballooned. The country built a system optimized for certification and for passing exams, not competence.

The pipeline is now visibly broken. This WASSCE cohort began as roughly 4,000,000 children in Class 1 twelve years ago. Only a fraction survived the journey. And among that surviving fraction, nearly half failed the most basic subjects.

A nation cannot lose this many minds without consequences. Every one of those lost or failed students represents not just a missed opportunity but a future risk. A society that produces millions of undereducated, underemployed young adults is laying down cognitive landmines across its democracy. These individuals are not equipped for the workforce, not integrated into the economy, and not anchored in the civic life of the country. They become vulnerable to misinformation, populism, extremism, and political manipulation. A country cannot withstand this indefinitely.

Why this requires radical intervention

Ghana cannot hire its way out of this crisis in two years. It cannot produce tens of thousands of new, fully qualified teachers overnight. What it can do is change the fundamental ratio of adults to learners – immediately – and begin to break the cycle.

The most powerful intervention available to Ghana right now is the redirection of the National Service Scheme into a decade-long national education effort.

A new national mission: Deploy All National Service Personnel into Schools 10years

For 10 years, every National Service personnel should be deployed into schools—primary, junior high, and senior high. They will serve as classroom assistants, literacy and numeracy tutors, remedial support staff, laboratory aides, supervision officers, and academic support personnel. This instantly collapses student–teacher ratios and stabilizes the entire learning environment.

To make the intervention effective, every university student should undergo a pedagogical immersion course the summer after third year. This does not turn them into teachers—but it trains them in how learning works, how reasoning is cultivated, how to communicate ideas, and how to support students.

This has two compounding benefits:

• It immediately improves classroom conditions for millions of children.
• It strengthens the analytical and communicative abilities of the National Service personnel themselves, creating a better-prepared workforce across all sectors over time.

This is how you rebuild a nation’s cognitive foundation: with manpower, intention, structure, and scale.

But No Intervention Succeeds Without Sustainable Financing.

Government alone cannot fund a 10-year educational deployment program consistently. Ghanaian policy is too vulnerable to political cycles and budget shortfalls. The intervention requires financial architecture that is insulated from politics.

The solution is a national system of Education Endowment Funds, regulated by the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA).

How the Education Endowment System Works

• Every senior high school establishes a regulated endowment fund.
• Alumni, parents, philanthropists, and private partners contribute.
• NPRA regulates these funds with the same discipline as pension funds.
• By law, funds may be used only for educational programming—never for infrastructure.
• Schools can cross-fund academic interventions where needs require.

This creates long-term capital pools dedicated to learning outcomes. It stabilizes the financing of the National Service deployment. It allows schools to fund tutoring, teacher aides, curriculum enhancements, laboratory supplies, reading programs, digital learning tools, and targeted academic interventions.

And it protects these resources from the volatility of political priorities.

Why do I care?Change the workforce before the workforce breaks the nation

Ghana’s future workforce must be fundamentally different from the one the system is producing today. It must be more literate, more numerate, more analytical, and more reasoning-driven. It must be capable not merely of following instructions but of generating solutions.

That kind of workforce is not created by slogans or conferences. It is created by classrooms packed with adult attention, well-supported teachers, improved instructional quality, and sustained investment.

If Ghana wants to change the trajectory of its economy over the next twenty years, this is the intervention that gives the country a fighting chance.

Redirect National Service. Build NPRA-regulated endowments. Collapse ratios. Strengthen teacher preparation. Reinvest where the country’s future actually sits: in the minds of its children.

Nothing else will move the needle than this initiative I call Project SURGE. The alternative is to continue manufacturing underprepared cohorts whose frustration, exclusion, and economic marginalization will one day threaten not just productivity, but the stability of Ghana’s democracy itself.

And again, risk our children become mere consumers and slaves in the sweatshops of foreign producers.

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