Knowledge Is First a Gift; Then an Achievement

“And He taught you what you did not know. And ever great is the favour of Allah upon you.” ~Surah An-Nisa, 4:113

This Verse of The Holy Quran approaches knowledge as an unearned status in life. It says you were taught it. The weight of this distinction is that, every piece of understanding you hold arrived through channels you did not construct: parents who spoke before you could respond, teachers who gave years to a subject before you entered the room, books produced by people you will never meet, communities that preserved practices across generations you never witnessed. The favour the verse names preceded any effort on your part.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt described this condition with precision. Her concept of natality holds that every human being is born into a world they did not make, inheriting institutions, languages, and accumulated knowledge that precede them entirely. This inheritance is the precondition of all action. You can only add to what exists because what exists was handed to you first. Arendt argued that the appropriate response is a form of care for the world: a responsibility to receive what was given, tend it, and pass it forward in better shape than it was found. Gratitude, on this account, changes how you hold what you know, and whether you share it freely or guard it as personal property.

Developmental psychology confirms the mechanism. Lev Vygotsky’s research established that cognitive development in every child happens through social transmission first. The child reaches understanding in the zone of proximal development, the space between what they can do alone and what they can do with a more capable guide. No one learns in isolation. When access to a knowledgeable guide is unequal across communities, the capacity to receive knowledge is unequal before any examination is sat.

Ghana is in the middle of a consequential conversation about who receives this favour. The National Education Forum’s 212-recommendation report, received by President Mahama in June 2025 and pledged for integration into the 2026 Budget, identified the unequal distribution of trained teachers as the most persistent structural failure in the system. In March 2026, Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu confirmed World Bank support of 300 million US dollars for school infrastructure upgrades, alongside GH₵1 billion from the GETFund directed at eliminating the double-track system in senior high schools. The question that will define the next phase is whether these resources reach the districts where children have historically received the least.

The global picture frames Ghana’s challenge within a shared failure of inheritance. The UNESCO 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report, launching on 25 March, focuses on access and equity, and its opening figure is that 272 million children, adolescents, and young people remain out of school worldwide. A separate UNESCO review places the number of adults without basic literacy at 739 million. These figures describe a world in which the transmission of knowledge across generations is being withheld from hundreds of millions of people by the conditions into which they were born.

In this Holy Month of Ramadan, write down what you have been given, then ask who around you has received less, and what you are positioned to do about it.

Issaka Sannie
Zongo Caucus Coordinator for the NDC UK and Ireland Chapter.

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