Konongo (Ash), Dec. 16, GNA - The government has secured 27 million dollars to implement the country's Education Strategic Plan designed to provide education for all, Mr Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, has announced.
The main thrust of the plan, he said, were to ensure that all children aged between six and 13 were in school and to train adequate number of teachers for the classrooms.
The Minister said Ghana presently had a trained teacher shortfall of 40,000. "Out of the total of 126,000 teachers required for the schools, there are 86,000 trained teachers and 24,000 untrained ones, leaving vacancies for 16,000, he added.
Mr Baah-Wiredu was addressing an ordinary meeting of the Asante-Akim North District Assembly at Konongo on Monday. He said his ministry was determined to see that all schools were supplied with sufficient books and had their teaching and learning aids in good shape.
The Minister urged district assemblies to actively engage the directors and create the platform for them to constantly update the assemblies on the progress of education in their areas. Mr Baah-Wiredu, who is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Asante-Akim North, spoke of efforts being made to address the problems of undue delays in the payment of salaries of newly trained teachers and the disparities of the "CAP 30" or Teachers Pension Ordinance and the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) pension for teachers.
He acknowledged the unfairness of the situation where teachers who go on pension under the SSNIT pension could receive amounts of money as low as 10 million cedis while those on CAP 30 take home about 90 million cedis.
The Minister, however, stated that as they worked to resolve the disparities, it was unhelpful for anyone to be issuing ultimatums and threats of strike action.
He told the assembly that job centres would soon be set up in all Youth Training Centres, which would be financially resourced by the government to take up contracts.
Mr George Frimpong, the District Chief Executive, said the assembly spent about 32.5 percent of its budget on education. This year alone, it spent a total of 1.25 billion cedis on the construction and rehabilitation of schools' infrastructure.
