Bawku Central MP Mahama Ayariga has spoken about possible funding avenues for his parliamentary motion seeking the suspension of all fees in public tertiary institutions for the 2020/2021 academic year.

According to him, the government should look at the GETFund receipts and statutory allocations made to the scholarship secretariat to support universities in the event that the motion is adopted.

“If you suspend the fees as outlined, there are some essential things that will have to run in the schools. One will be electricity, two will be water… to deal with those ones we can resort to the budgetary allocations from scholarship secretariat which can be shared among the universities to pay their water and electricity bills.

“Again, we have the GETfund receipts that were supposed to help fund tertiary education but we have found all manner of uses for the Get Fund receipts… we should be able to out of the GETFund receipts assist the universities so that students don’t have to pay fees.

Ayariga explained on Joy FM that it was the prerogative of the president to sit with university vice chancellors to decide which components of the fees needed to be abolished.

He underlined the fact that public universities are by law key beneficiaries of allocations to the scholarship secretariat and the GETFund. “GETFund alone annually gets in the area of 1.3 billion cedis,” he said advancing that more funds could be allocated to varsities this year to help cushion students and parents.

Parliament stood down Ayariga’s private member motion with the view to raise it after further details had been provided on the funding modalities.

The Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) is a public trust set up by an Act of Parliament in the year 2000. Its core mandate is to provide funding to supplement government effort for the provision of educational infrastructure and facilities within the public sector from the pre-tertiary to the tertiary level.