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National forumon girls’ education underway in Accra
At the forum

National forumon girls’ education underway in Accra

A national forum for girls’ education officers of the Ghana Education Service (GES) aimed at strengthening national efforts to improve girl-child education to the optimum has opened in Accra. 

Held annually, the event provides a platform for stakeholders in girls’ education to review their performance in the past year and plan for the future.

The three-day meeting is being organised by the Girls’ Education Unit (GEU) of the GES, in collaboration with Campaign for Female Education, Ghana (Camfed Ghana), an international non-governmental organisation.

It is on the theme: “Stirring up girls’ ambition: A spur to enhance learning outcomes”. 

The meeting, the fourth in the series, has brought together more than 200 girls’ education officers from across the country, government officials, development partners and other girl-child education stakeholders.

The forum will enable regional and district girls’ education officers to assess how stirring up girls’ ambition could enhance their educational outcomes and better their academic performance.

 Regional and district girls’ education officers and the GEU will also use the platform to give feedback on the progress made on the annual work plan.

Opening ceremony 

Welcoming participants in the opening session in Accra yesterday, the Director of the GEU, Mrs Catherine Mikado, commended the officers for their role in promoting girl-child education across the country.

She advised them not to rest on their laurels until gender parity, at all levels of education in the country, was reduced to 50 females to 50 males.

She said despite the strides made in the endeavour, which included the improvement of gender parity at the basic and tertiary levels, there was still more to be done.

Current statistics at the GES have established that the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with its stakeholders, has been able to move the disparity between males and females at the tertiary level from 70 males to 30 females to 60 males to 40 females.

Mrs Mikado called on girls’ education officers to go beyond just teachers to seeing themselves as role models for girls and raise the expectation of the girls under their care.

Partnership with Camfed 

For her part, the Executive Director of Camfed Ghana, Mrs Dolores Dickson, said Camfed’s partnership with the GEU was to help expand educational opportunities for girls through advocacy.

She said the NGO was also helping to expand educational opportunities for girls by financially supporting girls who were being deprived of education due to financial constraints.

Mrs Dickson said the partnership also provided learning opportunities for staff of the GEU through periodic capacity-building fora, both nationally and internationally.

“Another important component of the partnership is the funding of research on topics that Camfed and the GEU see as germane and which require detailed study for policy making and implementation,” she said.

In her remarks, the Chairperson of the 2016 forum, Ms Esther Cobbah, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Stratcomm Ghana, said females gave birth to and nurtured nations and, therefore, girls, in particular, needed to be given accesses to and encouraged to pursue educational opportunities to the maximum.

She called on girls’ education officers to continually add value to themselves to be able to enhance the psycho-social ability of the girls as well. 

She said education continued to be the backbone of development and, therefore, Ghana could not afford to relegate the education of females, who formed majority of the population, to the background in the national human resource development agenda.

 

Writer’s email: [email protected]

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