Abysmal performances recorded of late at the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in the Talensi District of the Upper East region have been linked to students’ neglect of books in search of gold.

Poverty, per Starr News checks, is the foremost condition pushing students out of classrooms into mining pits.

2015 best aggregate was 17

The district scored 16% at the 2015 BECE. Whilst the best aggregate obtained in the district was 17, some schools scored as low as below 5% in 2015 in the area. The pursuit of gold on the part of the students to the neglect of their schoolwork is just one of the factors responsible for tumbling standards of education in the area.

Many of the school-going children in the area are from deprived families who involuntarily skip breakfast so they do not miss their lunch or supper. Even the meals some of the houses can afford are extremely terrible in quality and exceedingly pitiable in quantity.

Mining students speak

With small-scale mining activities widespread in the district, students from such underprivileged backgrounds are shifting attention to mining holes to cater for themselves.

Whilst some, despite the presence of child rights and welfare organisations in the area, end up forgoing their schooling for mining, many of those who are determined to remain in the classroom hardly do have time to learn. This is because they exhaust themselves daily in the mining pits assisting concessioners who mostly exploit them.

“The problem is that, here, we the boys our parents are too poor and they are also too old. The strength to take care of us is no there. I’m also grown. So, I have to find how I will feed myself. I have to go to the mining site. You have to use a lot of strength. Before you finish, you don’t have enough strength to come and learn. Due to that, it reduces out performance,” Clement Boare, a form-three student of the Elim Junior High School, told Starr News.

A schoolgirl from the same school, Esther Mebadem, said sorrowfully: “It’s financial problem. Our mothers, that is the work (mining) they do. So when we reach house, they always ask us to help them so that they can get money to cater for us. When we convey the sand, bring it to the crusher, they grind it. We wash it. It will take about one month before you get money from it.”

Sensitisation efforts should be doubled? GES

The Talensi District Director of Education, Joachim Faara, disclosed there was evidence that some school-going children had dropped out at Yameriga and Datoku in the district obviously to seek fortunes in mining tunnels.

“We see education to be black gold for them. We’re pushing them to mine education. But the children are faced with hardcore realities that their parents are poor. They have to meet the unmet needs and go to school. We are dealing with very poor parents. Some of the children go to school without a breakfast. These are the realities. Some of them don’t even have fundamentals like pens, papers, bags to go to school.

“If not for government’s intervention, some of them would go to school with tattered uniform. Amid the poverty, they will rationalise, share their time between education and mining. When it happens, there is a high tendency that they will compromise education for the search of money. We need to double our sensitisation efforts,” the director added.

NPP candidate takes books to 32 schools

Meanwhile the parliamentary candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for Talensi, Thomas Pearson Duanab Wuni, has lamented the involvement of basic school students in mining activities, saying it poses serious risks to their future.

He has distributed textbooks to all the 32 basic schools in the district and has also announced plans to partner the Ghana Education Service (GES) to organise extramural classes for the BECE candidates to help reverse the district’s awful showing recorded at the examination in recent times.

“This is not the time to sacrifice your school to chase gold because you will spend it and it will finish. The gold that is down there can finish. But for education, once it is in your head, it will remain in your head. Keep going to school. When you finish your school, you can come and do your gold. In the last BECE, you all saw the results.

“Your friends didn’t get to go to any of the good schools because they didn’t pass well. Make yourselves proud by passing well. Then, your teachers would be proud and we as members of the community and politicians would also be proud that once upon a time we attempted solving a problem,” the candidate, widely also referred to as Homeboy, told the students during a four-day tour of the schools.