Abstract
This paper examines the impact of donor support to Ghana’s Basic Education sector since the 1987 Education Sector Reforms. It explores the extents to which donor support had contributed to the mitigating the challenges of basic education in Ghana in order to determine what remains. The paper draws on extensive literature sources and in-depth interviews with donor agencies and policymakers that are connected to the provision of Basic Education in Ghana. The data was collected for a doctoral thesis between 2006 and 2011. The paper argues that while donor support had sought to contribute to the resolution of many of the challenges facing Ghana’s Basic Education sector, many of the challenges remain. It found that there have been positive impacts such as gender parity at the basic level, improvements enrolment, attainment and complete rates yet others such as management inefficiency, poor motivation and teacher commitment, within sector challenges, weak supervision and ineffective sector coordination remain. Hence, it has been suggested that much more collaboration between donors and the Ghanaian government is needed to effectively tackle the persistent Basic Education sector challenges. KEY WORDS : Basic Education, Donor Support, Education Reforms, structural adjustments, Budget
Highlights
This paper explores the extent to which Ghana’s basic education system has benefitted key external agencies, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Department for International Development, the United States Agency for International Development, and a host of bilateral donor agencies, since 1987, when the Ghanaian government launched an education reform programme as part of a wider structural adjustment programme to reconstruct the country’s education system following years of Sulemana Adams Achanso The Impact of Donor Support to Basic Education in Ghana since the 1987 Education Sector Reforms decline
This paper has considered efforts by the Ghanaian government and its development partners to tackle Ghana’s basic education sector challenges, following the country’s economic and political downturns of the mid 1960s up to the early 1980s
The implementation of the 1987 Education Reform Programme, which was introduced by the government to address these challenges, had led to the closer involvement of multilateral and bilateral donors in Ghana’s basic education sector
Summary
The paper provides an overview of the state of basic education in Ghana by the mid1980s that necessitated the introduction of the reform programme This is followed by an evaluation of the contribution of key external donor agencies’ support to the programme and its impact on the provision of basic education in the country. There has been a virtual collapse of physical infrastructure in the provision of buildings, equipment, materials, teaching aids, etc...” (Abdallah, 1986:1 cited in Kadingdi, 2004) It was against this background that the 1987 Education Reform Programme was introduced by the Ghanaian government as part of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank sponsored Economic Recovery and Structural Adjustment programmes, leading to a closer and long term involvement of bilateral and multilateral donor agencies in the development of basic education in Ghana (World Bank, 2004; Thompson and CaselyHayford, 2007). Removes fees from basic education, replacing with a per capita grant going to each basic school
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