Afrikids, a child’s rights non-profit organization headquartered in the Upper East Region, has supported education in the Mamprugu Moagduri District with GHC50,000.
The funds from Afrikids are to be used to support education activities in 20 schools in the district. The support from Afrikids falls directly under the organization’s One Million Smiles program, which is in its third year.
When the District Director for Education in the Mamprugu Moagduri District, Elias Azure Abange, spoke to the media at a short ceremony in Yagba, he explained that his office had appealed for support from Afrikids after some School Performance Appraisal Meetings (SPAM) brought to the fore the many challenges faced by the over 70 schools within his jurisdiction.
These challenges, Mr. Abange said, include but are not limited to the lack of Teaching and Learning Materials (TLMs), rundown school structures, and water challenges in many schools that affect Water and Sanitation Hygiene (WASH) activities.
“Our district is a deprived district, and the government of Ghana alone cannot do everything. When you get to the schools, access to learning materials is a problem. When you get to some of the schools, they don’t even have enough furniture or classrooms or even teachers. Some of our doors and windows are broken. Some also need WASH facilities. Looking at the needs of our schools, we appealed to Afrikids to be able to support us,” he said.
While the GHC50,000 for the Mamprugu Moagduri District would not be enough to solve all education-related problems in the district, Mr. Abange explained that it “would go a long way to support us in dealing with some basic challenges.”
Mr. Abange expressed gratitude to Afrikids because, without the intervention of Afrikids, the quality of education in many of the schools would have been affected.
The District Director for AfriKids’ One Million Smiles intervention in the Mamprugu Moagduri District of the North East Region, Matthew Abagna, explained that his organization understands that the government cannot run education alone, and as Afrikids “wants to see results in the schools, there is a need to support the schools. These schools [after the SPAM] came out with what we call the SPIP, School Performance Implementation Plan. Out of the SPIPs, they costed their problems.”
According to Mr. Abagna, while Afrikids is supporting the 20 schools in the district to deal with many of their educational challenges, the communities are expected to provide their own contributions in dealing with the challenges. These expectations of the communities are not monetary but in the provision of labor to carry out all manual and technical repair duties.
“It is what we call counterpart funding. The communities have a share to contribute their share.”
The schools are expected to receive varied amounts based on previous needs assessments.
Two other districts, both in the Upper East Region, also received similar support. They are the Builsa South and Binduri Districts.
Source: A1Radioonline.Com|101.1MHZ|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Bolgatanga|
