Over-age children to go to school under new programme
The Ghana Complimentary Basic Education (CBE) Programme would integrate 1,500 children who are too grown to benefit from early childhood education into mainstream schools.
These “missing out of school going age children” as they are termed are beneficiaries of Link Community Development (LCD) programme; an NGO dealing in education ,which partner the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service to implement the programme in two Districts in the Upper East Region.
The districts are the Kassena-Nankana Municipal and the Kassena-Nankana West in the Upper East Region.
Mr Samuel Ofori Boakye, Programme Coordinator of LCD and also the Coordinator of CBE Programme announced this at the weekend at Pungu near Navrongo during the launch of the programme.
He indicated that so far LCD with support from the two District Directorates of Education and the Department of Community Development had established 60 CBE classes in 58 communities with 60 trained facilitators at post manning the classes.
The programme he stated had provided teaching and learning materials including some incentive packages to the facilitators.
He explained that pupils from the afternoon classes who are taught numeracy and literacy using their mother tongue as language of instruction for nine months would be integrated with the mainstream class.
Mr Boakye said globally education is key component to sustainable development and entreated stakeholders including circuit supervisors to support in the implementation process to make it successful.
Launching the programme, the Municipal Chief Executive for Kassena-Nankana Municipality, Dr Stanisluas A Kadingdi, noted that children who are taught literacy and numeracy in their mother tongues excel better than those who had not gone through the process.
He therefore entreated the children not to give up but to take their lessons seriously so that they could be successfully integrated into the formal education sector.
He appealed to parents to give their wards all the support they need when they are integrated.
Mr George Nontrah, District Chief Executive for Kassena-Nankana West, who expressed happiness for the programme said the assembly would collaborate with stakeholders to ensure its successful implementation.
The Kassena-Nankana Municipal Director of Education, Mr Augustine G. Ayirezang, said parents should own the programme so that by the close of the three- year period, a lot of children of school going age who could not benefit from the routine foundation in education would have received education.
Source: GNA