Plan Ghana rescues out-of-school children
Plan Ghana, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO), has rescued and provided Complementary Basic Education (CBE) to 9,139 out-of-school children in four districts in the Northern Region.
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This is to prepare the beneficiaries to enable them to be absorbed into the formal system of education in their respective districts.
Out of the number of children who were given the CBE, 6,768 have been successfully integrated into the formal education systems in their respective districts.
The beneficiary districts are Tatale-Sangule, Chereponi, Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo and the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly.
It is estimated that there are more than 440,000 out-of-school children in the country, with high concentration mostly in the deprived districts in the Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions.
Responsibilities
At a forum organised by Plan Ghana for Circuit Supervisors of Education, Social Welfare staff, Budget and Planning Officers, Girl-Child Education Coordinators and Ghana Education Service (GES) staff in the Savelugu-Nantong Municipality in the Northern Region, the Northern Regional Ghana Education Service (GES) Director of Supervision, Alhaji Issah Abah, blamed the high numbers of out-of-school children in the region on lack of parental responsibility.
He said many parents had shirked their responsibilities for sending their wards to school, and were instead using such children on their farms.
He expressed the worry that most of the out-of-school children, particularly the girls, usually ended up migrating to the southern part of the country to engage in head porterage, popularly known as Kayayei.
Alhaji Abah has, therefore, appealed to parents to be responsible and be concerned about their children’s future.
Project
It will be recalled that in October 2015, Plan Ghana, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, introduced a project dubbed: “Reaching and Teaching Out-of-School Children (REACH)” to provide for the needs of more than 440,000 out-of-school children concentrated in deprived districts in the country.
The Project Manager of Plan Ghana, Mr Sulemana Gbana, in an interview said the REACH Project had supported 3,000 out of the 6,768 out-of-school children.
Additionally, he said, more than 500 out of the 6,768 who had been integrated into the formal education system had received support from other implementing partners.
He said Plan Ghana would continue to make education accessible to all children in the country, particularly those in the deprived communities.
The Northern Regional Coordinator of Plan International, Mr Stephen Konde, explained that most of the out-of-school children enrolled on the CBE were aged between eight and 14, indicating that the children were selected from 189 communities and had been enrolled on 356 CBE programmes, with more than 44 per cent being girls.
