Basic education programme for 9000 out-of-school children
Over 9,000 children in four districts in the Northern Region who were out of school have got the opportunity to be educated through the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) programme.
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The children, aged eight to 14 , were enrolled in the CBE programme in the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba, East Gonja, Bole and Kpandai districts over the last two years, to undergo the nine-month functional literacy training which prepares out-of-school children for integration into the formal school system.
CBE programme
More than 2,000 of these children are now in classes four and five in various primary schools in the region, after successfully completing the CBE training.
The programme was instituted to provide access to education for out-of-school children, particularly those living in the most deprived communities of Ghana.
The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) is currently providing funding for a nationwide implementation of the programme with the goal of enrolling 120,000 out-of-school children by the end of 2015.
Children enrolled into the programme do not pay any fees, they have access to textbooks and other learning materials and are taught by facilitators who have been selected from the communities and trained to offer lessons to CBE learners.
Implementation
A Project Officer for the CBE programme, Mr Kofi Yussif Asuo, said IBIS, a Danish International Organisation, was responsible for implementing the DFID-funded CBE in those four districts in the Northern Region.
“IBIS is doing this in partnership with the four district assemblies, Ghana Education Service, Partners in Participatory Development (PAPADEV), East Gonja Civil Society Association (EGOGSA) and Choice Ghana,” he said.
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Mr Asuo explained that children enrolled in the CBE programme were taught basic literacy and numeracy skills through their local dialects, and that the evidence available showed that those children performed very well when they were subsequently integrated into formal schools.
Out-of-school children
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) estimates that as of 2012, there were over 600,000 children of schoolage in Ghana who were out of school. Majority of these children were in the three regions of the north.