The Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, has called on the country's development partners to increase their support for the education sector.

That, he said, was to ensure that the sector became more robust to produce the right human resource to speed up the transformation of the country.

Dr Adutwum said this yesterday in his opening remarks during a meeting with representatives of development partners in Accra.

Good citizens

“Education should be seen as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. We are not just training the children, we are training them so that they would be good citizens who will transform the fortunes of our country.

“We cannot do this without the support of development partners, we can’t. You have supported us over the years and I am calling on you to do more with me,” he said.

Development partners

The development partners that attended the meeting included the World Bank, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UNESCO, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which was previously known as DFID, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the French Embassy and USAID.

The development partners are helping in various ways to improve the education sector. They are contributing to, among other things, improve access, quality and accountability in the education sector.

They are also involved in the development of textbooks, for instance French, digital learning, reading initiatives, improving school management commitments as well as Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education.

Destination

He said in a developing country like Ghana, the people could not afford to have an educational system that was a journey to nowhere, “it has to be a journey to somewhere”

The minister said although some development partners might have had their frustrations, he wanted them to work together to get to the destination of an improved and quality educational system to produce the requisite human resource as there was so much to be done.

“There is so much ahead of us and the opportunity is tremendous.

“We can’t talk about the transformation of this country when our Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio is 18.8 per cent,” he said and added that “if that number does not go up, we are not going to get there”.

World Bank Report

On the 2018 World Bank Human Capital Index Report that said 56 per cent of Ghana’s human capital was going to go waste in the next 18 years because of the poor quality of the country’s education system, Dr Adutwum said the ministry was going to review the report.

The report made a stunning revelation that only 44 per cent of children born in the country today would become productive when they grew up.

But Dr Adutwum gave an assurance that the ministry would look at the indicators and turn them around.

“So our team is going to review that report. We have already requested to meet with the World Bank statistics group to walk us through every indicator that is in there, ...I want us to change this,” he said.