Mr Chals Wontewe, Country Director of IBIS, has described the current status of education in the north as nothing but sorrowful, which situation needs a stronger stakeholder collaboration to arrest.

He said education was the cornerstone of all rights, and expressed regret that education in the region continued to dwindle at a higher pace, saying, “Our salvation from our current poverty level as people of the north lies in good quality education because there are no industries to solve the poverty”.

Mr Wontewe told the GNA in an interview on Tuesday in Tamale that for the people of the north, they should have been eating, drinking, talking, thinking and dreaming education because there was no substitute to alleviate poverty in the area.

He said, “Our main source of livelihood, which is agriculture is also suffering now. Our shea nuts don’t give the same returns as the cocoa of the south. The gold and the iron ore that are being discovered and exploited would further destroy our agriculture and will not benefit the majority.”

He said it was important for people of the north to agree on how to use available resources effectively and judiciously, to ensure that they benefited from them, to be able to generate income to cater for their children in school.

Mr Wontewe said most people always complained about resources and poor quality structures and that though there had been infrastructure improvement, education was still sinking with a lot of failures at the Basic Education Certificate Examinations levels.

He indicated that an IBIS’ partner organisations that monitored the use of the capitation grant in selected schools reported situations where the grants were not touched in some schools for a whole year, and described the situation as appalling.

He said the report documented many instances of the inappropriate use of the grant, which defeated the purpose of setting it up, since those problems were still there.

He said over the past 20 years, there had been a steady improvement in school infrastructure and availability of trained teachers, but there had not been a commensurate improvement in learning outcomes.

He said IBIS would continue to work with its partners to see how best the falling standards in education in the north could be improved, and appealed to all stakeholders in education to collaborate to address the issue.