Education Minister confirms US$300m World Bank funding: For secondary education reform

By Ebenezer Chike Adjei NJOKU

[email protected]

The World Bank has committed US$300million to a new secondary education initiative in Ghana, Minister of Education Haruna Iddrisu has confirmed, stating that the funding, nearly double what was initially discussed, will prioritise the rehabilitation and upgrading of technical and vocational senior high schools across the country.

The announcement was made during a joint visit to the Armed Forces Senior High Technical School in Burma Camp in Accra, as part of a working tour by Paschal Donohoe, the World Bank Group’s Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer.

The project, formally designated the Secondary Education Transformation for Access, Relevance and Results for Jobs (STARR-J), is expected to commence in the current fiscal year.

Speaking before the World Bank delegation, Mr.  Iddrisu disclosed that the financing grew from an initial offer of US$180million made to Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson during the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington last year, when the government presented a blueprint for upgrading Category C schools to Category B and Category A.

By the time of the visit, the commitment had expanded to US$300million, he noted.

“The World Bank is dedicating 300 million US dollars to support a secondary education initiative,” Mr. Iddrisu said, adding that technical and vocational institutions would be among the primary beneficiaries.

At the event which had the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Major General Lawrence Kwaku Gbetanu, in attendance, the minister further committed that at least four major garrison schools would receive direct support under the programme.

The STARR-J project targets a system-wide restructuring of secondary and technical education. Its stated objective is to expand access to, and improve the quality and relevance of, secondary education in Ghana, with particular emphasis on expanding quality infrastructure and strengthening technical and vocational training pathways.

The project is designed in part to address the structural consequences of the free Senior High School policy introduced in 2017, which triggered a 60 percent surge in enrolments that the existing infrastructure and teaching workforce could not sustain.

The government’s response, the double-track system that rotates student cohorts to share facilities, has left learners with out-of-school gaps of up to 12 weeks per term. At its peak in 2018, 58 percent of the almost 700 secondary schools operated under the double-track arrangement; by 2026, that figure has declined to 38 percent.

The minister used the visit, as well as one to the Osu Manhean Basic School earlier in the day, to articulate the administration’s philosophy on technical and vocational training, citing a directive from President John Mahama that the prevailing model, in which students in vocational programmes spend an estimated 90 percent of instruction time on theory and 10 percent on practical work,  must be reversed.

The target ratio is 70 percent practical to 30 percent theory. Mr. Iddrisu stated that the World Bank investment in workshops and laboratory infrastructure was a prerequisite for achieving that shift.

“You cannot achieve it if we do not support you with robust infrastructure by way of technical workshops. The duty of the intervention of the World Bank is that it will come with some re-tuning of your workshops and your vocational centres; and we can show value for money for what you are spending,” the minister said.

Mr.Donohoe, in his remarks, described STARR-J as a continuation of the World Bank’s existing investment in Ghana’s basic education sector through the Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP), which has trained over 70,000 teachers and directly benefitted more than 3.1 million pupils,  exceeding its original target of 2.3 million.

He described the secondary education project as a means of sustaining those gains as students progress through the education system.

“What is so important about the next phase of our partnership is how we want to ensure that as the youngest of the pupils receive the teaching and support and development that they need, we can continue with them in their journey,” Mr. Donohoe said. He stated that World Bank support was directed at ensuring students acquire skills relevant to the labour market.

STARR-J has three principal components: new construction, rehabilitation and equipping of senior secondary schools and TVET institutions; improving the quality and relevance of secondary school programmes; and strengthening assessment systems and evidence-based management for the sector.

The project is the largest single World Bank commitment to Ghana’s secondary education sector and follows US$335.83million in combined IDA and Trust Fund financing already deployed under GALOP at the basic education level.

 

The post Education Minister confirms US$300m World Bank funding: For secondary education reform appeared first on The Business & Financial Times.

Read Full Story