Ghana needs access and equity in education to ensure development

Accra, Jan.6, GNA - Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), on Tuesday called on Ghanaians to have a change of mind set that formal education was the only option to developing ones ability.

She said while formal education placed power and knowledge in the hands of limited individuals for their personal benefits, informal education on the other hand placed the trainee at the centre of the training and the society as the beneficiary.

Prof. Opoku-Agyeman said the new thinking must be embraced by all to help shift from the colonial mentality focussing strongly on formal education as a way of ensuring development. Prof. Opoku-Agyeman said Ghana would do better, if it gave much attention and also invested in informal education as a catalyst for accelerated development.

Addressing the 60th Annual New Year School organized by the Institute of Adult Education (IAE), University of Ghana, she recounted how Asian countries such as China and Korea had developed at such a fast rate with much emphasis on informal training. She said those developed countries placed much premium on their culture combined with Information Communication Technology (ICT) and skills development, to achieve maximum socio-economic impact, saying Ghana could do the same if people began to accept, appreciate and exploit ways of enhancing their own skills rather than solely depending on formal education.

Prof. Opoku-Agyeman called for a shift from the colonial way of education alone which involved the three "Rs" - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic to the three "Ls" - "Life Long Learning", to ensure a more sustainable future in respect to national development.

She also urged members of the elite society to exhibit qualities such as humility, commitment to whatever assignments they were given and work towards the enhancement of the societies in which they lived, saying "these are the true qualities of an educated person. Prof. Yaw Oheneba-Sakyi, Director, IAE, said Ghana's triple heritage of education which spanned from the colonial, religious and government legacies over the past decades, needed to be re-examined, as the demand for higher education was growing.

He said according to a UNESCO report, only 2.6 percent of all children who enter primary schools eventually make it to the tertiary level. "Today, the demand for higher education in the country is very high resulting in a rapid increase in enrolments in the various traditional universities over the last two decades. Still Ghanaian public universities can only offer admissions to only about 35 percent of qualified applicants." he said. Prof. Oheneba-Sakyi said Ghana had made strides in expanding the structure of higher education since 1992, with the establishment of the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE), which became an advisory body to the Minister of Education. He said the privatization of higher education under the Education Sector Reform of the country's Economic Reform Programme were some of the interventions that gave private providers official permission to establish institutions of higher education, yet the challenges were enormous.

Prof. Oheneba-Sakyi said the current proliferation of private tertiary institutions and their activities in respect to training had lots of challenges of contention.

He noted that secular education in religious institutions and limitations in the curriculum of religious institutions, some of which focused on Theological Studies, Information Technology and Computing and Business Management to the neglect of courses in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, with little attention to research were a major concern. He said the reinforcement of class privileges offered by fee-based private higher education for the children of the wealthy and the elite were all worrying practices that prevented free access and equity in tertiary education in the country.

He said while knowledge was a key factor in explaining the difference between poverty and wealth the new Educational Reform, designed to change the entire educational system to make it more responsive to current challenges on the job market needed much support in terms of political will and commitment on the part of governments, to ensure maximum impact.

He mentioned challenges such as lack of infrastructure, aging faculties that needed replacements and lack of incentives to motivate existing tutors and attract other prospective ones to the job and lack of articulation between institutions as well as gender imbalances in staffing positions.