Uncapping GETFund will lead to accelerated infrastructure development — Eduwatch Executive Director

The uncapping of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) will lead to accelerated infrastructure development across the education sector in the country, the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch), Kofi Asare, has said.

He, however, suggested that once the GETFund was successfully uncapped, there should be a more transparent, efficient and equitable use of the fund.

He told the Daily Graphic that uncapping the GETFund would free up more funds in the next four years to finance education development.

“If the government succeeds in uncapping it, we want to see a much more transparent and efficiently used GETFund that is applied equitably in solving the infrastructure challenges of the education sector.

“We don’t want to see a GETFund where half of it is going into secondary education, we want to see a GETFund that is equitably distributed, with basic education receiving the majority because that is where we have the highest infrastructure deficit, followed by secondary education, colleges of education and then our universities,” Mr Asare said.

Opportunity

“I see GETFund being uncapped as an opportunity to finance the 140 promises that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has made in their education manifesto.

“Without uncapping the GETFund, it will be difficult to find alternative funding from the budgetary system. This is because the international credit market is virtually shut,” Mr Asare told the Daily Graphic.

At his vetting last Monday, the then Minister designate for Education, Haruna Iddrisu, said he would spearhead the uncapping of the GETFund to unlock additional resources for the country’s educational infrastructural development.

He said uncapping the GETFund would help release about $3 billion, which would make a total of $7.9 billion available to the Ministry of Education for expanding infrastructure.

Trees

Mr Asare said the GETFund was capped at the time when there were about 5,000 schools under trees and sheds in the country and at the time when money was needed to expand infrastructure to end the double-track senior high school.

For him, the infrastructure deficit was huge when the previous government decided to cap the GETFund.

“After the capping of the GETFund, we have lost over GH¢10 billion,” he said and that, that money could have been used to complete ongoing senior high school expansion projects that had not been completed due to poor funding.

“We could have used that $10 billion to remove all schools under trees and build new ones because we needed GH¢3.6 billion to do that,” he emphasised.

Mr Asare indicated that the capping of the fund was the single most pernicious policy decision that was ever taken by the last administration in the education sector. 

“Not only because it is one of the worst or the worst decisions, its implication was also negatively diverse, because it denied the sector funding for infrastructure and I’m talking about a sector that relies 90 per cent on GETFund for infrastructure development,” he said.

Decision

Eduwatch, Mr Asare said, supported the decision and believed that if the fund was successfully uncapped, the country would free up to GH¢50 billion in four years to finance education development as against the less than GH¢20 billion if GETFund remained uncapped.

He said there would be infrastructure development, given the agenda of the current government as contained in its education manifesto to undertake projects including building teacher's quarters together with basic schools whenever such facilities were being put up.