Ghana: Mrs. Baiden-Amissah Got It Wrong

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Public Agenda (Accra)

EDITORIAL
29 April 2008
Posted to the web 29 April 2008

Activities marking the 2008 edition of the Global Action Week (GAW), a world wide campaign platform for promoting the Education for All (EFA) goals, came to an end last Friday in Accra with the presentation of a resolution to the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports (MOESS).

The GNECC succeeded in driving home that there is the need for more concerted effort towards delivering quality education in order to end exclusion, especially in the three northern regions.

The GAW brought to the fore the fact that, worldwide, some 70 million children of school-going age are still outside the system. 800,000 of these children are estimated to be in Ghana with majority of them in the three northern regions. Factors such as poverty and disability are said to account for this.

Even those children in school have needs. For instance, GNECC established in a research that some parents were so poor that they could not provide school uniforms for their wards.

The research comes at a time government is providing free uniforms to school children, but very selectively. While justifying this policy, Mrs. Angelina Baiden-Amissah, Deputy Minister in charge of Pre-Tertiary Education, said at a durbar organized as part of GAW 2008 that government cannot give free uniforms to 'daft' students.

According to her, government will continue to provide school uniforms to only 'poor but brilliant' primary school pupils as a means of ensuring primary education for all.

Therefore, poor but not brilliant pupils whose parents cannot afford school uniforms for them cannot benefit from the initiative, unless they can prove their worth academically.

Public Agenda finds this position untenable and wish to state categorically that this policy amounts to selectivity. We share the view of those who believe that by refusing to give uniforms to the 'poor but not brilliant' pupils the ministry was in effect discouraging these children from being in school - an act that was tantamount to exclusion, which GNECC was seeking to end.

At any rate, how does the ministry determine brilliance? Is it by the theoretical or practical ability of the pupil?

We hope the deputy minister has not lost sight of the fact that several factors go into the academic performance of a pupil. Mrs Baiden-Amissah must know that each pupil has peculiar needs to enable him/her to perform.

Also, pupils come from different domestic settings with peculiar problems. Therefore, just because two pupils are poor does not mean they need the same solution to make them perform in school.

The government must see it as a responsibility to equitably distribute support to all who need it. If two pupils are poor, help must be given to both of them. Selectivity will only foster the exclusion we are fighting.

Public Agenda is therefore reminding government that Ghana's commitment to the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary school completion by 2015 may be dashed if government continues this way.

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