A GNA feature by Philip Tengzu
Wa, (UW/R), July 24, GNA – No one will ever refute the significance of education in nation building.
The sages also say education is the key to success. Access to quality basic education by the Ghanaian child had been recognised under the 1992 Fourth Republican Constitution of Ghana and the Children’s Act of Ghana of 1998 (Act 560) as an unalienable human right that every Ghanaian child must enjoy.
Fundamentals
Similarly, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is among some international treaties and conventions that also guarantee access to quality basic education by children of the United Nations member states that were signatories to those conventions of which Ghana is one.
Article 23 (3) of the UNCEC says: “Recognizing the special needs of a disabled child, assistance extended in accordance with paragraph 2 of the present article shall be provided free of charge … and shall be designed to ensure that the disabled child has effective access to and receives education, training, health care services, rehabilitation services …”
To that end, some schools in Ghana and perhaps, the world over, had been classified as Special Schools as a measure not to leave any child behind in education, or better still, denying a child his or her legally guaranteed right to education owing to his or her disability status.
In Ghana, special schools were for persons, in most cases, children living with one form of disability or the other – visual or hearing impairment and those with cognitive disabilities.
There are a total of 28 special schools in Ghana with three of them being in the Upper West Region – the Wa School for the Blind and Wa School for the Death both in Wa, and the St. Don Bosco Special School in Loho in the Nadowli-Kaleo District.
Operation of special schools
The special schools in Ghana are operated as Basic Schools, but in the form of Senior High Schools (SHSs) because they are Boarding Schools, and feeding for the children is provided by the government.
It, however, looks as if the government is forgetting the special nature of those schools and treating them as traditional or normal basic schools.
For instance, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the quest for the government to return to the traditional academic calendar, the special schools were lumped up with the basic schools and given the same 10 days of vacation without recourse to their feeding needs, while the SHSs sometimes stayed on vacation close to two months.
While the feeding for SHSs was provided under the Buffer Stock Company, feeding for special schools was under the Scholarship Secretariat because they were basic schools.
The government, through the scholarship Secretariat, provided money for the management of special schools to contract suppliers to provide food for the schools.
The WADEAF situation
The Wa School for the Deaf (WADEAF), established about 54 years ago (1969), currently had about 250 children from Kindergarten to Junior High School.
The youngest child in that school is about seven years, according to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) source close to the school.
Article 23, (1) of the UNCRC required that: “State Parties recognize that a mentally or physically disabled child should enjoy a full and decent life, in conditions, which ensures dignity, promote self-reliance and facilitate the child’s active participation in the community.”
However, to children in the Wa School for the Deaf, this right seem an illusion, in recent times, as the children had not been treated with the needed dignity and virtually denied their right to decent lives.
Feeding challenge in WADEAF
One would have thought that once described as special schools, the government would have provided them with special or preferential treatment, but the “insensitivity” of the government to those schools, and the WADEAF in particular, surpasses imagination.
Successive governments seemed to have paid little or no attention to these schools to the extent of stifling their feeding constraints.
The WADEAF, and probably other special schools in the country, have not received feeding grants from the government since the beginning of this academic year leaving the vulnerable school children in a critical condition with the risk of malnutrition.
Mr Eugene Miebu, the Chairman of the school’s Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) told the GNA that the children, for some months now, had no food to eat as the food suppliers had also refused to supply the school with food for lack of money.
Mr Miebu, added that after they had been able to scout for some maize grains for Tuozaafi (TZ) or Banku, getting money to buy ingredients for the soup was also a challenge so they had to resort to wild leaves from the baobab tree to prepare the sauce for the children to eat.
“Sometimes the school authorities have to go and beg some of the teachers that have gardens in the school for beans or pumpkin leaves for the cooks to prepare for them to eat,” the PTA Chairman added.
Mr Miebu said the situation is not peculiar to the Wa School for the Deaf, but also similar to the Wa School for the Blind and the St. Don Bosco Special School, and perhaps other Special Schools across the country.
WADEAF borrowing food
The GNA gathered that the children are feeding on maize the school cultivated within the campus for the past months but that had also been exhausted.
It had also gathered that the school management sometimes borrowed grains from some teachers at the school to cook for the children with the hope of repaying them when they received the feeding grants from the government
For the next two months or so (from now till September 14), if nothing is done by the government, the children in the WADEAF would have to continue to endure starvation in the school and grow lean day-in-and-out.
Perhaps by the time they returned to their families, their parents or guardians would not recognise them again because of the deformities owing to starvation.
The risk of malnutrition
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that at an early age, a child must eat good nutritious food for his or her proper growth and development.
“The time that the school was getting the support, the children used to eat eggs every day and every week they used to eat meat. They were satisfied and able to learn but now things have changed, it is not easy for us,” Mr Miebu lamented.
It is recommended that the kind of food a child consumes during his or her formative stages must be of utmost concern to the parents or caretakers.
It is even more imperative in the case of children with disability as their disability status presented the need for proper care.
That may be so for children with disabilities in some homes, but for those in some special schools in Ghana, particularly the WADEAF in recent times where access to food, let alone their nutritional content, is a rare privilege rather than a right.
The feeding situation in the school had left these vulnerable children in serious anguish, a situation one would never wish for his or her child despite one’s economic status.
Risk of schools closing down
The GNA had learnt that for the past few days, the leadership of special schools in Ghana had been on the “neck” of the Director General of the Ghana Education Service (GES) for the release of feeding grants for those schools.
The decision, however, is in the bosom of the Ministry of Finance to either release the money for the feeding grants for these vulnerable children whom the state considered as children with special needs or to simply ignore their concerns.
But the last option in this situation is to eventually lock up the schools and ask the children to go home to meet their parents and caretakers.
For me, it is better to die of hunger in front of my parents than to die of hunger in the hands of the state that owes it a duty to protect its citizens, especially the vulnerable groups.
“If you can’t provide, then let us close the schools. Don’t starve the children here. This is the time they need good food to grow”, the GNA source close to the school suggested.
The Appeal
Mr Miebu, therefore, appealed to the government to turn its attention to the special schools in the region and the country as a whole to alleviate the plight of the vulnerable children who are going through starvation as a result of the lack of food.
He also appealed to benevolent individuals and organisations to come to their aid with the provision of food to enable them concentrate on their academic work.
GES response
Meanwhile, Madam Sophia Dimah Nandzo, the Wa Municipal Director of Education, said the feeding challenge at the WADEAF had come to her attention and that they had made a request to the necessary authorities for the release of grants but were yet to get any response.
Madam Nandzo said she had appealed to the Wa Municipal Assembly to consider supporting the special schools in the municipality with food to reduce the plight of the children but no response.
“Unfortunately, these are children whose parents are also poor. In other places, philanthropists donate to these schools, but it is not like that here in the region,” she observed.
GNA