“Go and see if it has increased. Even when they were saying that, the backbone of that was that we were going to focus on e-learning. People could learn from their locations. You didn’t need the brick-and-mortar and those physical locations anymore and a huge national ICT infrastructure was going to be put in place for online learning platforms.”
Nii Armah Addy, an Educationist and Management Expert said this when he spoke on the government’s performance in the education sector on A1 Radio. His comments were in connection to comments made by the NPP ahead of the 2020 general election.
As part of the government’s aim of reaching a Ghana Beyond Aid, the NPP, through it manifesto proposed a continued “increase [in] the manpower resources and teaching facilities, including the use of ICT teaching aids, of public tertiary institutions to support the anticipated increases in student population from the Free SHS graduates, as well as resources and infrastructure for special needs education across the country. We will make sure no student who has obtained admission to a tertiary institution is denied access because they are unable to pay fees, by providing them an option to obtain a student loan without the requirement of a guarantor for the loan, provided the student has a National Identification Number from the GhanaCard, and to defer repayment of the loan after National Service plus an additional one-year grace period.”
Aside fully implementing the no-guarantor system for student loans, Mr. Addy is worried that almost 2 years down the line, the government has still failed to achieve more than 30 percent of its own target of expanding access to tertiary education.
“Go and find out if an ICT national structure or backbone has been put in place. Go and find out if it is there and it is working. Go and find out how many of our university students can submit their assignments online and receive responses from their lecturers online. Go and find out it what we call Moodle, it is a common platform in UK, where you interact and do everything with your lecturers online is available.”
“I am telling you that we haven’t. Please we haven’t,” he insisted.
Earlier, Mr. Addy scored the government’s performance in the education sector less than 30 percent.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
