Government is considering allocating two per cent of the annual Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) allocation to support the Ministry of Education’s response to emergencies affecting schools and learning, the Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, has said.
The proposed funding mechanism, according to him, was expected to enable the ministry to respond more quickly to disasters such as floods, fire outbreaks, storms and other emergencies that disrupted teaching and learning across the country.
The Minister disclosed this in Accra on Friday at a communications briefing ahead of the Second High-Level Conference on Scaling Education Initiatives in Emergencies (EiE) West Africa.
The conference, organised by Associates for Change (AfC) in collaboration with its partners, was to bring together education ministers, researchers, innovators, financiers, academics and regional bodies to discuss strategies for ensuring continuity of education during emergencies.
Mr Iddrisu said Ghana’s experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, floods, conflicts, tidal waves and other disasters had exposed weaknesses in the country’s preparedness to sustain education when schools were disrupted.
He recalled that the COVID-19 school closures in March 2020 disrupted learning for millions of students, exposing inequalities in access to digital education, particularly among children without electricity, smartphones or radio.
He said the experience had prompted the government to expand innovative digital education mechanisms and tools from kindergarten through primary and junior high school to ensure that learning continued during future emergencies. Read More
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