Kongo Senior High School
Some 1,200 female students have been displaced at the Kongo Senior High School (KONSEC) in the Nabdam District of the Upper East region after a contractor engaged to build a hostel for them reportedly disappeared from site.
Authorities at the school are under pressure to allow the displaced girls look for shelter outside the campus where observers fear their safety and security could be compromised.
The student population of the school stands at 2,200. The number is made up of 926 boys and 1,274 girls. Government, from the inception of the school, made provision for girls’ hostel. But the female students soon outgrew the size of the available dormitory and it became necessary to put up a bigger structure to accommodate them.
In 2010, a hostel project was awarded and was expected to be completed and handed over in 2012. But four years after the expected handing over never took place, the project is still only about 60% complete and the contractor, the Araco Construction Company, according to the authorities of the school, is nowhere to be found.
For now, the girls, who outnumber the boys, have been moved to a larger dormitory originally meant for the boys whilst the boys now occupy the old hostel built for the girls. The improvised girls’ dormitory is massively congested with about 30 students in each of the rooms meant for only 15 people. The hostel looks like a disorganised refugee camp with verandas and corridors to the building excessively choked with luggage owned by the students who have no spare space to keep them.
“Because we want them (the girls) to have sufficient space inside, we have asked them to bring their chop boxes outside so that they will have sufficient space inside the dormitory. If not, majority of them would have to either be day students or they would have to look for accommodation somewhere? which we want to avoid. Once they leave here, they are likely to entangle themselves in a lot of problems,” the headmaster of the school, Ambrose Kwaku Johnson, told Starr News.
Some of the female students shared their frustrations with Starr News, saying the congestion had been inimical to their studies.
“We are suffering, especially during heat season like this. No space for us. Some of the students sleep in the classrooms. When it rains, some of us have to sit till day break,” Esther Alhassan, a student, lamented.
Another student, Ruby Aloku, complained: “The first-year students are sleeping outside. Our chop boxes, our garri, our books, are always wet when rain is falling.”
When contacted, the manager of the Araco Construction Company (who declined to mention his name as of the time of filing this report) attributed the delay to nonpayment of contract capitals due the company by the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) for the completion of the project.
“It’s a GETFund project, and they are not paying. We have just raised a claim that we are sending to Accra for payment,” he told Starr News in a telephone interview.
