Accra, June 30, GNA - Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister for Education, has called on African leaders to give thought to policies and programmes that could exact economic benefits from education.
He explained that there the need for African governments to adopt home-grown policies to transform the economic and social outcomes of their countries, as well as meet international market requirements.
Dr Adutwum made the call at a dinner after the closing session of the one-day World Bank Ministerial meeting on Education for Western and Central African countries in Accra.
“We can only transform our vicious cycle of poverty into a vicious cycle of prosperity through education.
“Let’s all help change the African dream and African nightmare. We have to come together and share ideas and experiences like we have done today else prosperity would elude us,” he said.
Finance and Education Ministers from 22 Western and Central African countries attended the Accra event, which aimed to discuss and adopt a new education strategy being promoted by the World Bank to enhance learning outcomes.
The ministers leveraged the dinner event to share experiences and best practices, success stories.
Dr Adutwum outlined the huge investment the Ghanaian government had made in the nation’s education sector, especially in the Technical, Vocational Education and Training spheres, tailored solely to equipping the youth with the requisite skills and knowledge to support the manpower needs of the country.
He emphasized that to ensure that African countries move out of poverty and dependency on foreign aid, there was the need for governments to give a premium to the educational development of their people to enable most of its populace to be economically viable to support economic growth.
“We cannot continue doing the old things and expect to get new results. We should up our game and do more to transform our economies.
“The best days for Africa are not behind us but ahead of us. Let us, therefore, forge ahead in unity and work towards revamping our economies through the transformation of our education policies,” he stated.
The education minister warned that the “future generation will not forgive the current leadership of African countries if things go wrong,” saying that it is incumbent on the leaders to get the best policies that can transform the continent’s economies.
He charged the leaders to take a critical look at their education systems to ensure that it aligned with the 4th industrial revolution for socio-economic transformation of the continent.
GNA