World Education Ghana offers 5,000 out of school children education

Accra, April 1, GNA - World Education Incorporated, a non-for-profit organisation, is implementing the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) programme in five districts in the Brong-Ahafo Region, to reach more than 5,000 children with complementary basic education (CBE).

The 145 beneficiary communities are in the most deprived areas in Kintampo North, Kintampo South, Sene West, Sene East and Pru districts.

Mrs Susan Adu-Aryee, Country Director of World Education Ghana says the organisation aims at improving the lives of marginalised people through non-formal education and training, institutional development support, and targeted technical assistance.

World Education is one of the 10 implementing partners currently working to ensure that children who have never been to school or have dropped out are able to transition to primary education after completing a nine- month cycle of intensive literacy and numeracy instruction in the mother tongue.

This is in line with the Universal primary school target necessary for Ghana to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 2) deadline by 2015 - ensuring that all children complete primary education.

In spite of various government interventions such as abolition of school fees, provision of capitation grants to schools, school feeding, teacher training and provision of free school uniforms and textbooks, Ghana still has to put in place efforts to ensure that all children are in school in order to achieve MDG 2 universal primary education.

The CBE is one of such programme that provides an opportunity for out-of-school children to enter primary education. This is done by developing the child's basic mother-tongue literacy and numeracy skills required to access grades three or four of primary school through an accelerated literacy and numeracy approach specially targeted to their needs.

For the past 15 years, a number of non-state organisations have provided about 150,000 out-of-school children with access to CBE, and around 80 per cent of these children have transitioned to formal primary education on completion of the programme.

With evidence of the CBE programme results , the Ministry of Education is committed to the expansion of CBE to reach all out-of-school children and is receiving financial and technical support from the UK Department for International Development and USAID, to provide CBE to 200,000 children from 2012-2018.

The process of expansion of CBE in Ghana began in 2013 when the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service along with 10 NGO implementing partners and the Management Unit led by Crown Agents, were able to target 43 districts across four regions reaching approximately 79,000 children.

In the Brong Ahafo Region, 5.6 per cent of children from 8-14 years-old are out of school representing 24,044 of the number.

Data from the 2010 Population census estimate that 44,737 children in the region have never attended school.

Disparity in educational attainment is pronounced among the districts; more than three fifths of the population of Sene representing 63.9 per cent and 57.6 per cent of the population of Kintampo North and South as well as Pru have never been to school.

Communities in these areas are mostly made up of migrants mainly from the three northern regions and the Volta Region who have settled in the region for economic reasons; farming and fishing.

Children in the migrant communities face various challenges that inhibit their access to education. Most of the settler communities do not have formal schools and even when they do, most parents prefer to engage their wards in economic activities rather than sending them to school.

Out of 145 communities in which World Education Inc is implementing CBE, 72 are without formal schools.

The implication is that more than 1,800 learners from these communities may not be able to transition to formal school because they were born in remote rural areas.

Among the numerous challenges that may be a barrier to implementation are the difficulty in identifying experienced facilitators to train the children, the long distances and unfriendly   terrain that   implementers, learners and facilitators have to endure.

World Education Inc started work in Ghana in the mid-1970s and has so far built capacity in the education sector to better address HIV and improve girls' access to education and implement complementary basic education.

World Education Ghana has contributed to the local and national response to the HIV epidemic through expert technical support in research, monitoring and evaluation, service delivery, training, programme and finance management, the use of non-formal education techniques, partnership building, and network strengthening.

World Education Ghana is a field office of World Education, Inc., a non-profit organisation based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Registered as a private voluntary organisation, it has worked in more than 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as in the United States.

GNA