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Tales from Ghana: New challenges and adventures

After being in Accra for three weeks I am finally preparing to head to the Millennium Village to begin work. Since my arrival, I have been working out of the UNESCO Accra Cluster Office and familiarizing myself with the policies and challenges to increasing education access and quality here in Ghana. In my first week I attended the National Education Sector Annual Review Meeting, and have since met with the coordinators both for the Girls' Education Unit (GEU) and for Education ICT. What has been clear is that while Ghana has made great strides in achieving universal enrollment and gender parity, enrollment increases have posed big challenges to maintaining education quality. As enrollment rates have grown, the percentages of trained teachers and adequate learning resources have decreased.

 It is encouraging to know however that Connect To Learn is working to improve education quality by providing new ICT resources to schools, and I am particularly excited about the contributions we hope to make this summer by identifying interventions that will enable teachers to more effectively use ICT resources to improve their teaching. Now that we have met with the National ICT Coordinator, we will be able to align our work with what the Ministry has already begun in regards to training secondary teachers in ICT integration.

 I learned while speaking with the coordinator of the Girls' Education Unit that, while the GEU has made great efforts to implement girls' clubs at the primary level, no work has been done yet at the secondary level. They were excited to learn about the work Connect To Learn will be doing to identify student and teacher interests for the implementation of some kind of girls' empowerment clubs at the secondary level in the Millennium Village Projects, and they hope to use our findings to inform their own nationwide efforts.