NGO presents smartphones to GES to boost mobile School Report Card
The Millennium Promise Alliance (MPA) Inc, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), last Monday presented 800 smartphones to the Ghana Education Service (GES) to be given out to basic public schools in two districts for the mobile School Report Card (mSRC).
The beneficiary districts are the Amansie West and Amansie South districts in the Ashanti Region.
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The mSRC provides a digitised end-to-end process for collecting real-time data concerning pupils, teachers, resources and overall management at the school level.
Commitment
Briefing management of the GES, the Country Director of the Millennium Promise Alliance, Chief Nat Ebo Nsarka, explained that the presentation was part of a commitment of the organisation to scale up the mSRC.
He said since the signing of an MoU in April this year to scale up the mSRC to cover all basic schools in the country, “MPA has been undertaking a number of preparatory activities, including the revision of the mSRC Training Manual and the development of policy guidelines on the use of mobile hand-held devices in the education sector in Ghana.”
Preparatory stage
“These preparatory activities are meant to create an enabling environment and the policy framework ahead of the scale up.
“With the preparatory activities completed, we are now moving into the roll-out phase of the work, which focuses mainly on building district level capacity for the mSRC roll-out,” Chief Nsarka explained.
He further explained that the district education officers, circuit supervisors and head teachers would be trained, starting with those in the two districts.
Chief Nsarka recognised the centrality of education to sustainable development in the partnership with the GES, adding that MPA’s support for Ghana’s Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) policy for education was intended to help ensure ICT integration for excellence and equity in education.
Partnership
The Director-General of the GES, Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, who received the devices on behalf of the GES, thanked the organisation for supporting the mSRC.
Describing the presentation as ‘ great news,” he was confident that from the two districts, the organisation would expand the project to cover more districts and ultimately, all the districts in the country.
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said the mSRC was key to the GES, especially, “this will help track teacher absenteeism among other things as school enrolment and performance of pupils”.
He believed the move would improve on teacher time on task and assured the organisation that the GES would continue to partner with it for the betterment of education in the country.
