A section of the Complementary Education students at the Lamboya community
Some 500 deprived children drawn from 20 communities in the Bawku West District of the Upper East Region will get the opportunity to gain formal education from September 2018.
The children, all of whom were out of school, have undergone a nine month complementary basic education programme and have received basic training in numeracy and literacy in their mother tongue, as well as formal school ethics; hence their readiness for integration into the mainstream.
The Link Community Development (an NGO) supervised the education of these 500 children in their communities with the help of volunteer teachers. Under the complementary basic education concept, the beneficiary communities recommend a volunteer to be trained as a facilitator to handle these children. Then a maximum of 25 out-of-school children are admitted into a class and are taught for nine months with their local language.
A Ghana Education Service Desk Officer in charge of the complementary basic education in the Bawku West District, Alhassan Adissa, said but for the intervention of the programme and Link Community Development, the 500 children wouldn’t have had the opportunity to gain formal education because there was no deliberate plan at the community or district level to go after them.
In all, the Link Community Development intervention has covered a total of 3,700 children from 2014 to the 2017/2018 academic year. Out of this number, 3,200 have already been integrated and 500 will be integrated into the formal education system come the beginning of the 2018/2019 academic year.
Project Manager with Link Community Development, Joachim Faara, was hopeful that the Bawku West District Assembly would adopt the programme to ensure that other children who are still out of school in the district are covered and enrolled.
He commended the community facilitators for their sacrifice to their communities and urged those interested in becoming teachers to take steps to get enrolled in a college of education to become professional teachers.
Bicycles and cash rewards were given to the 20 community facilitators who handled the last batch of complementary basic education in the Bawku West District for their sacrifice to the deprived children.
FROM: Ebo Bruce-Quansah, Zebilla