Kingsly Agyemang – Director of Scholarship Secretariat
GOVERNMENT HAS awarded scholarships to 47,160 Ghanaian students to undertake full time undergraduate or postgraduate studies at universities and training colleges in the country and foreign institutions of higher learning.
The Ghana Scholarships Secretariat, which administered the various scholarships, awarded local scholarships to 45,000 tertiary students and 1,600 training college students.
The presidency, which announced this in a tweet, said the remaining 560 students were also awarded foreign scholarships under the online scholarship application process.
The statement again indicated that completed projects under the Free Senior High School Infrastructure Intervention stand at 657 out of a total of 1,119 projects from GETFund and other funding sources.
It said the National Teaching Council (NTC) also issued a total of 128,789 licences to teachers, while the Ghana School Feeding Programme fed 3,448,065 pupils in 10,832 public basic schools with one hot nutritious meal every school going day in 2021.
It assured that the government would continue the rehabilitation and upgrading of technical universities, upgrading and modernisation of the erstwhile 34 NVTI centres, retooling of TVET institutes, and establishing 10 state-of-the-art TVET institutes.
The government earlier announced that some of the STEM centres being developed would be operationalised this year and would be fitted with state-of-the-art equipment and laboratories to facilitate teaching and learning in all areas of study, including artificial intelligence and robotics.
So far, public expenditure on education has almost doubled from GH¢20.7 billion between 2013 and 2016, within the era of ex-President John Dramani Mahama, to GH¢40.4 billion between 2017 and 2020, representing an increase of some 95%.
At 90th anniversary celebration of Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), President Akufo-Addo stated, “Within the next two years, it is proposed that ten thousand (10,000) housing units on affordable terms will be developed for teachers across the country. This, as we all know, is the tip of the iceberg, but it is a good beginning.”
BY Ernest Kofi Adu