Let community tailors, dressmakers sew free uniforms — Dialogue participants
Participants in a national dialogue on free school uniforms have called on the Ministry of Education to build the capacity of local tailors and dressmakers to enable them to take up contracts to sew uniforms for schoolchildren in the communities.
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They said that would prevent the practice of contracts for the sewing of the uniforms being given to only big-time tailors and dressmakers in the cities.
At the national dialogue held in Accra on Tuesday, the participants further said sewing the uniforms at the community level would boost job creation at that level.
The participants discounted claims that some tailors and seamstresses in the communities could not execute the contract and that was the reason the contracts were given to well-established ones in the cities.
Leading the discussion in a presentation titled: “Maximising social protection in education: The free school uniform in perspective”, a Senior Programmes Officer of SEND Ghana, Mrs Harriet Nuamah Agyemang, urged the Ministry of Education to involve small-scale tailors and dressmakers to generate jobs at the district level across the country.
She also called on the ministry to re-negotiate and award the contract for the production of the fabric meant for the school uniforms to local textile industries.
Involving MMDAs
Mrs Agyemang said even though the free school uniforms as a social protection policy was laudable, its implementation was a challenge and called for a review of the policy to enable metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) to play key roles in its implementation.
She also called on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to involve the MMDAs in the planning, implementation and distribution of the free school uniforms to make the assemblies claim ownership of the project.
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She said as it stood now, the MMDAs were not involved in any way, since the school uniforms were given to them only to distribute to schoolchildren in their jurisdictions.
She called on the GES to improve monitoring and supervision of the policy from the point of manufacturing to distribution and also empower its regional and district directorates to reject sub-standard uniforms.
Sharing a research report by SEND Ghana, Mrs Agyemang said between 2009 and 2016, over GH¢61.8 million was allocated for the free school uniform programme but the actual expenditure could not be ascertained.
Commendations
The Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, Mr Siaka Stevens, commended the NGO for the report, which he described as an eye-opener, and pledged the commitment of the committee to act on the findings of the research by SEND Ghana.
The Ranking Member of the committee, Mr Peter Nortsu-Kotoe, said the policy was a good social intervention that needed to be managed well.
Why the project
The Executive Director of the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Mrs Linda Ofori-Kwafo, who chaired the dialogue, explained that the aim of the policy was to reduce the cost of education on parents in order to increase primary school enrolment.
She stated that it was also a response to a monitoring finding that indicated that the non-availability of uniforms was one of the key reasons pupils stayed out of school.