Scholarship for more local students right decision
On August 1, 2023, the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) paid GH¢25.3 million of the annual fees on behalf of 4,279 students of various universities and colleges in the country.
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The awardees enrolled in undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate programmes in those institutions.
This time, more scholarships were awarded to applicants studying in local universities and colleges, a major shift from previous years when GETFund scholarships went in favour of Ghanaian students studying abroad.
The number of successful applicants this year, according the GETFund, is 63 per cent higher than the 2,704 recipients for last year.
The Daily Graphic learnt that some 300 qualified applicants are yet to take advantage of the scholarship and wish to urge them not to waste the opportunity availed to them as more than 17,000 applicants may be awaiting their turn.
The beneficiaries must justify the investments made in them by studying hard and obtaining the needed grades to remain on the scholarship scheme.
They need to know that their continuous sponsorship by GETFund is directly linked to their academic performance and the fund will not hesitate to withdraw the scholarship of those who fail to attain the required grades.
Moreover, GETFund reserves the right to withdraw their scholarship in the event that they are beneficiaries of other scholarship scheme(s) or based on misconduct and also deferment of programme without prior written approval from the Administrator of the GETFund.
The Daily Graphic commends the management of GETFund for veering away from awarding scholarships to Ghanaian students to pursue university courses abroad at an exorbitant cost, when those students could have taken the same courses locally.
The cost of sponsoring one student to pursue a programme in a foreign university is equivalent to training over 22 medical doctors locally.
For the 2022/2023 academic year for instance, the average cost of training a first-year medical student locally, even as a fee paying student is about GH¢12,000 annually, while same students, pursuing Medicine in any UK university will pay not less than £19,000 annually.
In addition to this £19,000, the government pays warm clothing allowance, books allowance, a monthly stipend, among others, and so, annually, a student pursuing a programme in a foreign university requires not less than £23,000.
It is a fact that formerly, while a local student was denied GH¢20,000 to pursue a programme in a local university, his counterpart seeking scholarship to pursue an almost similar programme in a university in the UK was granted a £13,000 tuition fee as well as some reasonable amount of pounds sterling to cover warm clothing and books allowances, a monthly stipend and others annually for two years.
Unfortunately, most of those students end up refusing to return home after they had been trained with the taxpayer’s money, thereby denying the country their expertise, the reason for which they were sent out there.
It is not uncommon to hear now and then students on government scholarship outside the country complaining of not receiving funds from the government as they should.
Last year, when the Russia-Ukraine war erupted, Ghana had to evacuate its students studying there and most of them are continuing their programmes in Ghana.
That means that whatever they are being taught in those foreign universities is similar to or the same as what is done locally.
The Daily Graphic cannot understand how management of the fund did not see the waste that went on when such amounts could have been used to train so many professionals instead of one individual.
Ghanaians cannot fathom why such decisions were taken and nobody, including our representatives in Parliament, ever raised any red flags.
So, if the management and board of GETFund find it prudent to rather invest in our universities by sponsoring students to pursue programmes locally, we cannot but applaud this decision.
Indeed, that is the way to go and there should be no turning back.
This decision by GETFund is not only saving the national purse, it is also a way to sustain the local universities so that they are not starved of funds.
For us to attain the much-touted Ghana Beyond Aid objective, strengthening our educational institutions to produce the needed human capital is non-negotiable and the step GETFund has taken is in the right direction.
