Reforming And Repositioning The Ghana Scholarship Secretariat

The recent appeals for funds by Manasseh Azure Awuni for a brilliant boy who has stayed home for two years after being admitted to UHAS to study medicine due to lack of funding has again piqued my interest in the whole sham called Ghana Scholarship Secretariat.

In any decent society, there're always arrangements to cater for the weak, poor, and needy. Such arrangements are made in all sectors of the society - from healthcare to accommodation to education. Altogether, we say a decent society must provide a safety net for the weak and poor.

Free SHS, for example, is an important safety net to provide education for all people in our country, at least, at the high school level. However, there's almost no arrangement for further education after senior high, even though recently, there have been pockets of interventions here and there. But, such arrangements are very random, disorganised, and not well thought through - making them ineffective.

A critical institution that must institutionalise assistance to the poor post senior high is the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat. Unfortunately, that institution, has over the years, become an avenue for political tokenism, where party people regardless of their eligibility, are rewarded with sponsored studies abroad.

No serious country, which is struggling to stabilise its economy, will throw monies at something whose impact cannot be properly accounted for. I have been studying budgetary allocations to the Secretariat for some time now, and the amounts involved are so huge to be allowed to go waste!

What has been the impact of the Secretariat on the socioeconomic development of Ghana? Are we getting value for money for all the monies we throw at the Secretariat? Especially when there have been allegations of rot and massive corruption in the nature of nepotism, favouritism, and bribery against the Secretariat.

I have been trying to wrap my head around why we spend thousands of pounds to sponsor people to go and read courses that could easily be studied in Ghana. I don't want to offend any program of study, and so, I'll refrain from naming specific programs. To be brutally honest, some of the programs are rubbish and undeserving of the thousands of pounds we through at them.

Clearly, and I have personally interacted with many beneficiaries of the Secretariat outside Ghana, the selection process is clogged with massive rigging and corruption. Since selection is not driven by national need nor meritocracy, we end up spending our meagre resources on utterly useless programs or programs that could easily be studied in Ghana.

From the foregoing, I propose a radical change in the functioning of the Secretariat. First, the secretariat should be set in law (act of parliament) and removed from the presidency. In the law setting it up, how programs and individuals are selected for funding should be explicit. The law should require the secretariat to report to parliament on how many students have been sponsored, what programs they studied, and the socioeconomic basis for the selection of the courses.

Further, post sponsorship integration report, i.e., how the nation utilises the expertise of the people trained with our taxes, should be presented to parliament for scrutiny. There should be stringent penalty for the Secretariat should they breach any of the requirements. For example, I have personally met students sponsored with our monies to do master's who after completion, become cleaners, care workers, and other menial workers outside Ghana. What a waste of money! More disgusting is that, some pay bribes to receive letters of consent from the Secretariat in order to apply for graduate visas in the countries they are sponsored to study.

The secretariat should also be mandated to survey Ghana's labour market annually, identify areas lacking, and attempt to fill those areas in concert with the relevant institutions. We must not al the give Secretariat a carte blanche to operate as it wants. No! Imagine, in the medical field, Ghana to date, lack some of the critical expertise which could easily be filled if the Secretariat become serious and plays its role in our country!

Second, all brilliant but needy students should automatically be enrolled on scholarship by the Secretariat after senior high. There is no point sponsoring massive number of people selected purely based on rigged processes to go and study master's outside and become menial workers, when there are budding talents struggling to even acquire a bachelor's degree. Those people should be bracketed and automatically sponsored through a transparent need-based assessment. That's how a society protects the poor. Only what is left of taking care of such weaklings should be channelled to other areas of the educational ladder. We should put our monies where mouths are!!

Third, and finally, whenever a person is selected, a full stream of uninterrupted allocations should be made available to him/her. If you have no money, don't give scholarships! Many universities outside Ghana have begun to reject guarantees from the Secretariat because it cannot honour its obligations to the universities by way of fees payments. Many students have been left in a state of frustration, with some literally living in penury because their stipends are not being paid. DAAD for instance abrogated its memorandum with the Secretariat, because the secretariat could not honour its part of the bargain of a paltry 15% of stipends to students. In fact, this is absolute humiliation.

During my research visit to some countries in the Europe, some students complained about how they have had bad grades, which undermines further progress in their academic journey due to the fact that they had to combine working to fend for themselves and studying because the Secretariat could not pay stipends for months. Some have been threatened with ex-matriculation from their universities and ejection from their apartments because of the incompetence of the scholarship secretariat. Why give scholarships if you can't afford it? This clearly highlights the tokenisation of the secretariat.

Most unfortunate is how the elites are benefitting from the secretariat than the poor. This is not right, and it is unconscionable. The scheme should exist entirely as a safety net for the poor, and as a critical institution to fill our national human resource gaps. Anything short of this, is unacceptable! Ghanaians must rise up and demand accountability from the secretariat. I am urging parliament to take a keen interest in the secretariat and reform it!

Sulemana Issifu
Research Fellow
Hans Ruthenberg Institute
University of Hohenheim
Germany