Ada Kasseh (G/A) May 25, GNA - Stakeholders in the Ada East District of the Greater Accra Region, has called for decentralisation of the country’s free school uniform programme to ensure transparency and create employment to the local communities.
Ms Mary Fiergbor, Headmistress of Azizanya D/A Basic School, Ada East expressed concern about the distribution pattern of the programme since some of the stakeholders, especially the District Assembly members were not involved in the production and distribution of the uniform.
Speaking at dialogue on the outcome of the free school uniform programme organised by SEND Ghana, a civil society organisations, Mrs Fiergbor said government must consider suggestions from the community level before implementing such initiatives.
Mrs Fiergbor said some of the uniform did not conform to persons with disability.
The stakeholders include Ghana Education Service, District Assemblies, Youth Organisations, Ghana Federation of the Disabled and community leaders.
She explained that some of the sizes of the uniform did not fit the children because they were sewed in Accra without taking into cognisance the appropriate sizes of the children.
However, the Assembly Members said they had no knowledge about the programme since they only heard the information from people, explaining that it did not augur well as far as local development was concerned.
Mrs Sandra Kwabea Sarkwah, Project Officer, said SEND Ghana conducted a survey to assess the state of realisation of objectives of the free school uniforms programme that was initiated in 2009.
The survey was in collaboration with the Global Partnership for Social Accountability and supported by the World Bank titled: “Maximising Social Protection in Education: The Free School Uniform Programme in Perspective.”
She said the survey studied 61 schools in 30 districts in the Greater Accra, Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions and found the programme was fraught with challenges such as poor distribution guidelines, the lack of a credible schools selection criteria, scarcity of data about the programme, among others.
She said according to the report from the GES, out of 2.3 million uniforms distributed, 23.6 per cent was distributed to the four regions in which the survey was conducted between 2009 to 2015 academic year.
The survey revealed that the source of the garment used for the production of the free uniforms was unknown to the agencies leading the project, making government’s aim of boosting the local textile industry hard to assess.
It also revealed that in some cases, pupils received over-sized or under-sized uniforms and that during validation there were mix-up in the labelling of uniforms packages, poor sorting of uniforms per the measurement coupled with weak supervision results in sending wrong sizes of uniforms to schools.
The survey recommended that the Ghana Education Service (GES) should ensure that the criteria for selecting beneficiary schools and needy pupils are adhered to so that the intervention would benefit the poor and vulnerable.
It also recommended that GES should enforce guidelines for the distribution of uniforms and that the guideline should be made available to all regional and district directorates to guide implementation of the intervention.
The Ministry of Education should reconsider its decision and renegotiate and award fabric production contract to local textile industries in the country, the survey recommended.
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