President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said as part of a comprehensive approach to improving education in Ghana, his government has invested over $700 million in the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector.

In a speech read on his behalf by Education Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, at the opening of the National Education Week (NEW) 2020 on Tuesday, October 27, the President revealed that the investments went into improving TVET infrastructure across the country.

“We are pursuing several initiatives, including the MyTVET campaign, to address and reverse the negative connotations that TVET has suffered in this country, and we have invested over $700m in retooling, refurbishing and constructing TVET institutions across the country,” the Education Minister said on the President’s behalf.

Recounting achievements at the tertiary level, the President said his government met a sector without a guiding policy direction causing tertiary education to develop without proper guidance as the expansion was not properly coordinated.

“Within the period, we took on the challenge and developed a National Tertiary Education Policy with extensive stakeholder consultations. This subsequently fed the Public Universities Bill which is currently going through the legislative process.

“The education sector had an outdated legal and institutional framework. This posed a challenge to effective management and governance of the sector for the delivery of quality service. To address this, we initiated a comprehensive legal and institutional reform agenda in 2017,” the president said in the speech read on his behalf.

The 2020 National Education Week was on the theme “Reforming the Education Sector for Effective Service Delivery: Assessing Progress,” and will run from Tuesday, October 27 to Wednesday, October 28, at the Accra International Conference Centre.

NEW is held annually by the Ministry of Education to engage stakeholders in the review of sector performance and collectively strategise towards the attainment of sector targets.