Make manifestos more specific -GNECC tells political parties

 
By Bernice Bessey
The Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) has called on political parties to consult civil society in the development of manifestos.

This, it noted, will ensure broader policy and strategy options for political parties in developing manifestoes, especially, in areas concerning education.

According to the GNECC, promises must take into consideration existing global and national frameworks on education, to sustain progress in this relevant area of human resource capacity building.

This recommendation was contained in GNECC's “Civil Society Evaluation of promises under education: Achievements, challenges and way forward”, launched in Accra recently.

Chairing the launch was Child Rights Activist Bright Appiah, who observed that some promises on the manifestos were mostly not measurable and definitive, making them impossible to evaluate.

Using the ruling National Democratic Congress 2012 manifesto as a classic example, he said promises such as 200 senior high schools and elimination of schools under trees were ambitious, in view of resource constraints in the economy.

“Some of the promises were strategically weak. For example, the promise to build 10 new colleges of education to increase teacher enrolment was misplaced, since the existing 36 were operating at 50% capacity, due to government-imposed admission quotes,” he noted.

To him, promises should lend to measurement within the time frame of four years to enable assessments of what has been achieved during the party's term.

According to him, manifesto promises should place more emphasis on addressing improvement of learning outcomes, and inequalities in distribution of education facilities and resources.

Mr. Appiah noted that political parties must take into consideration available resource, more so, when Ghana already commits over 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) into education.

However, he recommended that political parties should make their manifestoes more definitive, specific, measurable, realistic, time-bound and costing plan.