By William Yaw Owusu
Friday August 1, 2008
A British/French initiative to improve access to basic education across Africa is to take off by 2010 commencing in Ghana.
The initiative will be start as a pilot project in Ghana before its replication in other African countries.
It will make it possible for schools to be built and furnished, as well as provide learning materials to facilitate government’s effort of ensuring high quality education at the basic level.
This was disclosed by Caroline Coles, Managing Director of Piscara Learning, a United Kingdom-based company spearheading the initiative, jointly announced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Nicholas Sarkozy in London in March.
The scheme will also involve multinational corporations worldwide. They will be asked to move financial contributions to compensate their activities on the environment.
Piscara will by 2015 through the initiative have provided educational infrastructure and learning materials for schools in Ghana at basic and second cycle levels.
Under the initiative companies will invest funds into the Piscara, African Children Education project which will be used to build the schools.
It will further provide high quality teacher training, leadership training management and curriculum support for the schools as well as emphasise on technical and vocational skills and training in order to ensure the sustainability of educational programme.
Mrs Coles said “it is an ambitious project which is putting about 16 million children from Africa in school between 2020 and 2015.
She said she had already conferred with officials of the government of Ghana including the Minister of Education Science and Sports saying “a good number of schools will be identified, improve on their infrastructure, build new one and turn them into model schools.
“There will be enough schools for every child to attend and we will facilitate the ICT revolution by providing laptops and computers for the children to get on board.”
Mrs Coles further said “quality and access to education should be standarised so that every child will have access to quality education.” Dr Baafour Adjei-Barwuah, Ghana’s former Ambassador to Japan who assisted in gathering the project implemented in Ghana said “this is the best undertaking we can get to sustain our educational infrastructure and development”.
He said the initiative will focus on the delivery of employable skills adding “this is the direction in which our educational sector should take because our economy needs skilled labour”.
Dr Adjei-Barwuah said the government would encourage the initiatory of the projects to support the educational sector adding “if is a wonderful opportunity for us to strengthen the effort to ensure high quality education in the country”.
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