Inadequate infrastructure will be a major problem for schools as they reopen – Kofi Asare

The Executive Director for the Africa Education Watch Kofi Asare has stated schools in Ghana will face challenges following directives to reopen schools to begin the new academic semester.

According to Mr Asare, the lack of adequate infrastructure in some schools will be a hindrance to a smooth and successful semester.

In an interview with GhanaWeb’s Amos Ekow Coffie, Mr Asare said the lack of beds in some schools especially schools that have abolished the double-track system will face a huge challenge with congestion.

“The challenges that most of the schools will face is that we may still have to deal with congestion until adequate beds arrive. This is for double-track schools but for the single-track schools their situation is even worse, because if you look at the calendar GES issued, it means from today, in all single-track schools, they are going to have all form ones, all form two’s and all form three’s in schools. And if we have all of them today without adequate beds, there will definitely be a challenge and that is why all of them are crying that without the beds they will struggle to accommodate the form three students who are coming to schools,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Asare said his outfit is not happy that the government is taking long in providing furniture for the schools to enhance smooth academic work for students and teachers.

“I disagree that over a month ago when we were not ready to accommodate students and senior schools raised issues that the problem was not with building, it wasn’t with bricks and mortar building, it was just beds, I thought that this being an emergency could have been resolved a month ago. We are rather not happy that it is taking the GES and Ministry of Education more than one month to procure beds for schools,” he added.

He said parents are worried over the Ghana Education Services (GES) calendar that is unable to state the exact date students will be reopening schools when they go on vacations and the GES must act on that.

“The system we are running obviously parents will be worried because parents have been planning their vacations with the calendar, parents want to be at home when their kids are home so that they can provide parenting for them so they take their leave, etc, so the calendar being changed over and over again poses a lot of challenges to parents,” he added.

However, schools have reopened to allow form 3 students to go back to school to make up for the academic semesters they missed out due to the COVID-19 pandemic last year. They earlier spent some two weeks holidays at home after a stressful three months of studies in the post-COVID-19.

Listen to the full interview below