Bongo District in the Upper East region has seen a massive reduction in the number of school dropouts with the introduction of the Complementary Basic Education (CBE), Bongo District Director of Education has disclosed.
This achievement was disclosed to the media by Director of Ghana Education Service for the Bongo District, Mr. Duncan Nsoh during a quarterly media tour organised by Afrikids Ghana, an International child right and community development organization working in northern Ghana to eliminate child suffering and poverty to the various communities where the CBE is being implemented.
Mr. Nsoh indicated that the CBE programme was introduced mainly to ensure that out of school children are in the classroom to acquire education, instead of loitering about.
“Having come to the realization that there are so many children still loitering about, we felt that all directors in the northern sector together with all educational stakeholders and duty bearers needed to come together to make sure that all these children were mobbed up and put into school and all we could come up with, is the complementary Basic Education.”
CBE Coordinator for Bongo District, Mr. Edward Asakeya, indicated that the children will be graduated after assessing their performance thoroughly before enrolling them into formal education.
He was, however, satisfied that the CBE project is yielding very good results; hence the number of out of school children has reduced from 625 to 325 students in Bongo District with 13 facilitators.
CBE project trained facilitator in Lungo community; Aniah Helena Atinganpoka said the children are coping very fast with learning and reading especially the local language. She indicated that she is very optimistic that they will excel after the programme.
The Ghana Complementary Basic Education (CBE) Programme is a functional literacy programme initiated by the Government of Ghana and its development partners (the UK Government Department for International Development – DfID), to support out of school children between 8 and 14 years of age who have never attended school to access education, with a stepping stone phase of literacy classes taught in their mother tongues and held in their local communities.
By: Ngamegbulam Chidozie Stephen/a1radioonline.com/Ghana
