NUGS will resist full cost recovery

The National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) on Thursday warned of any attempt to introduce full cost recovery into the funding of education, saying this would be resisted by the students.

At a press conference in Accra, Edward Omane Boamah, NUGS President regretted that private sector participation in education was drawing professionalism away from the "sons and daughters of the poor".

He said NUGS was calling for the establishment of a Students Loan Trust instead of the proposed company limited to administer the new Students Loan Scheme.

The press conference was to make an input in respect to a workshop held in Elmina in May this year to deliberate on the final report of the Paul Effah Committee constituted by the Minister of Education to restructure the Students Loan Scheme.

He said while NUGS accepts the report in principle certain aspects required modification to make it more "meaningful to the current national priority needs."

He said NUGS was calling for the appointment of an independent consultant who shall advise on periodic basis, the optimum loan required by students, taking into account the cost of training students in various programmes to bring objectivity into the process.

In a communiqu? presented to the press, NUGS also called for the development of a national identification system, which shall be used to identify beneficiaries of the loan to ensure efficient loan recovery. In the interim, however, they said the SSNIT Social Security number should be used.

It said, while a tentative 12.5 per cent fixed interest rate had been agreed upon, the ultimate interest rate to be charged would be determined upon completion of a "rigorous analysis to ascertain what level of interest rate would ensure sustainability of the scheme, while minimising the level of indebtedness of beneficiaries."

The Communiqu? said the Trust should start with the first-time applicants at the beginning of the 2004/5 academic year, when the new Students Loan Trust Law would have been passed.