A day’s District Level Dialogue on Global Partnership for Education Grant (GPEG) organized by SEND – GHANA and its partners has been held in Yendi.

The event was done in collaboration with Action on Voluntary Child AID, an NGO with support from Ibis and the stakeholders to the event were drawn from the Yendi Municipality.

The objective of the dialogue was to share and discuss GPEG research findings with district level stakeholders and a build consensus for the implementation of commitments.

Mr Jonathan Dery, Project Officer of SEND – GHANA, said in 2012 the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Ghana Education Service (GES) accessed a 7.5 million dollars (GH¢ 128, 350 000) grant from Global Partnership for Education (GPE) to support non-salaried expenditure in 7015 schools in 75 deprived districts.

Mr Dery said the overall objective of the three year grant is to improve on planning, monitoring and delivery of basic education services.

He said the study was to examine the flow of the grants from national to the school level and assess the utilization of the grant by education directorates and the beneficiaries of the GPEG programme.

Mr Dery said grant allocation to GES increased from GH¢ 43 million in 2013 to GH¢ 79 million in 2014.

He said any existing inconsistencies were due to the inability to reconcile quarterly financial reviews to planned expenditure.

Alhaji Mohammed Habib Ibrahim, Assistant Director in charge of Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation and Research in Yendi GES, said the Municipal Assembly is happy to be one of the selected assemblies benefiting from GPEG.

He said GPEG provides support in areas like the provision of teaching and learning materials and the supervision and monitoring of projects.

Alhaji Ibrahim said in the Yendi Municipality 105 primary schools, 31 junior high schools with four kindergartens attached to some primary schools are benefiting from the GPEG programme.

Mr Abubakari Shani, Programme Manager of Action on Voluntary Child AID, said Northern, Upper East, and Upper West are among the regions which are benefiting from the GPEG programme.

He said there was the need for the formation of Municipal Parent Teacher and School Management committees in the Municipality to make their functions more effective.