By Philip Tengzu
Wa (UW/R), March 22, GNA – Mr Divine Kpe, the Senior Programmes Officer, Africa Education Watch, said the next government must intensify efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target on Education by 2030.
He called on leaders of the various political parties and the citizens to ensure that issues that affected education were captured in their manifestos for the 2024 general election.
Mr Kpe said this in a presentation on the education sector during a zonal consultative and town hall meeting in Wa, to collate the inputs of stakeholders towards influencing the political party manifestos for the impending elections.
It was organised by the SGF in partnership with the Community Development Alliance (CDA) as part of the implementation of the Manifesto Influencing initiative, a component of the Gender Rights and Empowerment Programme (GREP).
Stakeholders including traditional leaders, representatives of youth groups, students, vulnerable and marginalised groups among others participated.
Mr Kpe identified the present gap between the urban and rural schools in terms of quality, access and resources distribution, as some challenges in the sector, which must be addressed.
He said though the Ghana Education Service’s protocol provided for basic schools to be within three to five kilometre radius, children in some rural communities trekked farther than these distances to access basic education.
He said furniture deficit, disparities in academic performance between rural and urban schools, equal access by Persons with Disability (PWDs) to quality education, feeding grants to special schools, and strengthening of the Complementary Basic Education to rope in the about 1.4 million out-of-school children to receive basic education, must all be tackled.
The discussion paper suggested a relook at the Free Senior High School (FSHS) policy to ensure people who needed the intervention benefited from it.
That was because about 250,000 children could not access secondary education in the first instance despite the existence of FSHS due to financial challenges in the procurement of the long list of items on prospectuses, additional feeding cost and transportation, among others.
Mr Caeser Kaba Kogoziga, a Health Economist and Consultant, reiterated the importance of a robust health sector to every Ghanaian irrespective of one’s social, educational or political status.
In times of health emergencies people had no choice of which health facility to attend, hence the need to strengthen the health secctor.
Mr Kogoziga said distance to health facilities, unavailability of service providers, abandoned health projects, quality of the service resulting from availability of medicines and equipment, and the health workforce were some factors that affected the sector’s performance.
Dr Emmanuel Kumi, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social and Policy Studies, University of Ghana, in a presentation on Social Protection, said in some instances social protection systems were not effective enough.
He could not fathom why there were good social protection programmes yet many individuals were increasingly becoming vulnerable, especially people in the informal sectors.
“When you look at the social protection (programmes), they mostly look at people from the rural side, but they don’t consider those who are in the urban side of the country,” Dr Kumi said.
He said it was important for actors to consider ways in which vulnerable people in the urban centres could also benefit from the social protection programmes.
The participants identified inclusive education, review of the FSHS policy, and provision of educational infrastructure as key priorities in the education sector, which should be captured in the party manifestos.
On health, they mentioned improvement in the patient-doctor ratio, efficient transport system for patients during emergencies and provision of equipment, infrastructure and strengthening of the National Health Insurance Scheme as key priorities.
There was also a firm call for the passage of the Affirmative Action Bill, efficient funding of social protection programmes, and good data systems for vulnerable and marginalised people as priorities for redress under the social protection sector.
GNA