The Smart School Project is a waste of resources – NDC candidate for Effutu constituency

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) Parliamentary Candidate for the Effutu Constituency in the Central Region, James Kofi Annan, has questioned the introduction of the Ghana Smart School Project.

President Afufo-Addo on Monday, March 25 2024, launched the Ghana Smart School Project as part of the government’s effort to promote e-learning and digitalization. The project includes the distribution of 1.3 million educational tablets to senior high school (SHS) students across the country. 

In an interview on Accra-based Citi-FM on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, Mr Annan argued that resources allocated for the provision of new tablets for students could be used to establish new ICT labs or renovate the state of ICT labs in senior high schools.

“The smart school project is a waste of resources, it’s a populous project; it is not sustainable, and it will collapse in no time,” he stressed.

He further stated that the new tablets that have been acquired should be replaced with the old ones that have become defective. 

“There are thousands of secondary school students across this country. Most of these schools have computer labs that have no computers or they have dysfunctional computers. Some of the second-cycle institutions do not have computer labs,” Mr Annan said. 

He continued,” If you mean well to improve upon learning outcomes through ICT, what you have to do is to use those computers that you have acquired to resource the existing broken down computer labs and set up new ones where they don’t have computer labs so that every student can benefit”.