Pay attention to educational needs in marginalised areas - Prof. Kwame Akyeampong advises govt

A Professor in International Education and Development, Professor Kwame Akyeampong has advised the government to pay attention to the educational needs of children in hard-to-reach areas.

“If we are going to develop as a nation, we need to pay attention to the marginalised and the disadvantaged.

“If we do not pay attention to this segment of our society and increase our investment and support for these communities that have been left behind, we are not going to tap into the full potential of our human resource in Ghana,” Prof. Akyeampong said in an interview with the Daily Graphic.

Prof. Akyeampong, who has been appointed member of the Yidan Prize Advisory Committee, was sharing his thoughts with the Daily Graphic on how Ghana can leverage education to develop. 

Harnessing human resource

He said the human resources in the country did not only lie in the urban areas, “in fact, if we want to maximise the contribution of education for our development, we have to look at foundational literacy and numeracy.

“If you go to some places in Ghana, the quality of education they receive is very poor. It shouldn't be the case that a Ghanaian child goes to school and by the time the child gets to grade six or junior high, he cannot read and write properly.

“If the foundation is weak, no matter how much infrastructure we build, no matter how much investment we put into any other part of education, we are not going to reap the benefits,” Prof. Akyeampong stressed.

He stated that elsewhere, where education was used to improve their growth and development, they paid attention to the weakest areas of their system.

Prof. Akyeampong, who is also a Board Member of Transforming Teaching, Education and Learning (T-TEL) and a Senior Fellow at CDD-Ghana, explained that in those systems, they made sure that education was equitable and resources were used to lift the majority of their people out of poverty.

“We need to do the same. It does not matter if you live in the north, west or east.

You have to be guaranteed a quality of education that is as good as you can get anywhere else.

“That means that we have to make choices.

These may be difficult choices, but if we make those choices to provide the infrastructure, pay attention to teachers who are serving in these areas where nobody wants to go and teach and give them incentives, we would begin to see within a very short space of time a phenomenal growth in our development,” Prof. Akyeampong said. 

He stressed that it should not be the case that Ghana was mentioned among those countries where children in primary, junior high school or senior high school were lacking foundation.

Representing Africa

Touching on his appointment to the Yidan Prize Foundation Board, he said it was an opportunity to represent Africans' interests and what other African education researchers had done.

“So, my appointment is to give an African representation on the Yidan Prize Foundation, bring my knowledge and expertise and my research on education and development to help the Foundation to improve its policies to identify the best education and practices globally, including research coming from the continent of Africa,” Prof. Akyeampong said.