Implement policies which benefit all children: GNECC urges education stakeholders
The Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) has called on policymakers and stakeholders in the education sector to make provision for adequate policies and measures that will cater for the needs of schoolchildren especially children with disability.
It stated that although the Ministry of Education through its agencies rolled out measures to ensure continuity of learning during COVID-19, the proposed measures did not adequately cater for the needs of children with various forms of disabilities.
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The National Chairman of GNECC, Joseph Atsu Homadzi, said it was important to make those policies and measures in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal Four (SDG4), which called for inclusive education for all children.
He added that education underpinned many of the SDGs, and it was fundamental to the realisation of other rights, hence the citizens must hold the government accountable and keep them on track.
Mr Homadzi made the call at the launch of the Global Action Week Celebration on Education, a campaign focused on ensuring the delivery of quality education for all children.
The advocacy campaign was on the theme: "Building forward a resilient pre-tertiary education through inclusive planning" held at the GNAT hall in Accra last Monday.
The week-long celebration sought to demand measures such as increase in domestic funding to education for marginalised group to guarantee public and free education, inclusive and gender-sensitive education planning and the promotion of digitisation to enhance access to equal learning opportunities for students with special needs.
Policies
At the launch, the programme officer for the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Palham Oyiye, who read a speech on behalf of the Deputy General Secretary for GNAT in charge of Education and Professional Development, Kwame Dagbandow, stated that inclusivity should be encouraged to benefit persons with special needs.
In this regard, Mr Oyiye said, adequate provision should be made for the payments of their stipends timeously, provision of learning aids, and assistive devices such as braille, hearing aids among others.
In addition to that, Mr Oyiye urged the Ministry of Education and the various stakeholders to bring reforms and improve policies to achieve higher quality education.
He expressed the need for teachers to be well versed in the use of technology in teaching and learning to enhance education delivery.
Mr Oyiye said teachers lacked in this aspect across the country and this was worrisome.
“It is also evident that the unavailability of electricity or solar panel energy, reliability of Internet connectivity in the urban and peri-urban as well as marginalised communities such as slum and rural settings along the country poses myriad of challenges," he said.