GETFund digitises project monitoring, boosts scholarship awards

The Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) has, in recent years, digitised its project management, monitoring, and evaluation to enhance efficiency and transparency.

This means that personnel from the Fund no longer need to physically visit project sites to stay updated, as they can now monitor contractors with the aid of technology.

These reforms are part of initiatives instituted by GETFund under the leadership of the Administrator, Dr. Richard Ampofo Boadu.

GETFund project portfolio

Since its inception by Act of Parliament (Act 581) in 2000, GETFund has initiated 11,248 projects. This includes 6,272 projects at the basic education level, 3,863 secondary school improvement projects, 101 E-blocks, nine model schools, four TVET centers, and 999 projects at the tertiary level.

Addressing a forum in Accra on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, Dr Boadu stated that these reforms would “ensure transparency and effective outcomes.”

Some deliverables from the reforms, as noted by Dr Boadu, include “streamlining eligibility criteria, digitising the application process, emphasising STEM subjects, and increasing support for girl-child education, thus giving extra weighting to female applicants.”

Solving embarrassing problems

According to the GETFund Administrator, the reforms have also "overhauled the bottlenecks that created the embarrassing situation of foreign scholars’ fees and stipends not being paid on time, with harrowing consequences, as well as improving the monitoring of scholarship programmes."

He disclosed: “The Fund’s scholarship reforms have borne fruit with respect to foreign scholarships, moving from awarding 104 scholarships at the graduate and undergraduate levels in 2017/2018 to 352 in the 2019/2020 academic year.

“At the local level, the number of awardees at all levels stood at 333 in 2017/2018, jumping to 1,680 in the 2019/2020 academic year and surpassing 4,200 in the 2022/2023 academic year,” Dr Boadu added.

The core mandate of GETFund is to provide funding to supplement government efforts in the provision of educational infrastructure and facilities within the public sector, from pre-tertiary to tertiary levels.

Increase in local scholarships

Meanwhile, 5,026 persons have benefited from local scholarships in the 2023/2024 academic year, a sharp increase from the 1,680 awarded in the 2019/2020 academic year. The majority of these scholarships—an estimated 74 per cent—go to public universities.