Ms Elizabeth Ohene, Minister of State for Tertiary Education on Monday observed that most of the students who gained admission to the universities with good grades were children of parents who paid for extra classes or extra costs of their wards from class one to the junior secondary school level.
She asked how come that all those who entered the universities suddenly become the wards of "poor parents"?
Ms. Ohene was speaking on the topic; Making Education Services work for the Poor: The Challenges for the State at Development Dialogue Series sponsored by the World Bank Ghana Office in collaboration with leading Ghanaian think-tanks and institutions to promote discourse on development policies.
She said there was general complaint about the size of loans being granted students in tertiary institutions and facilities in them were inadequate judged, especially against the background of the "old good days" when education at all levels was virtually free.
Ms Ohene said with increase in population the requirements to meet the growing needs of education and the nation needed to provide 2,400 additional primary school blocks in a year while 1,740 were needed for junior secondary schools.
The primary school blocks would cost 180 billion cedis while those of the junior secondary schools would run into 15 billion cedis.
Ms Ohene said 92.8 per cent of budgetary provision for the Ministry of Education went into the payment of teachers and other educational workers salaries leaving less than 8 per cent to investment.
Teachers are also the unhappiest workers because their salaries are low and that all those factors put together posed great challenges to the development of education.
Mrs Elizabeth Joyce Villars, Chairperson of Private Enterprises Foundation (PEF) and Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), speaking on Making Services working for the Poor: The Role of the Private Sector called on government to initiate policies that could attract and develop businesses in the rural areas to reduce poverty to enable the poor to pay school fees.
One of such policies could be contract management where a contractor could provide some services in the area of in his or her operation to support education as Accra Metroplitan Assembly (AMA) had done with some business enterprises in solid waste management.
She said the fact that private sector thrived on profit motive, their activities could influence development of the rural areas.
Mrs Villars said education in the urban areas seemed to be having a boost because of private sector activities.
Cardinal Peter Turkson, Cape Coast Catholic Diocese chaired the function which was opened by Mr Mats Karlsson, World Country Director.
