The Department for International Development (DFID) has partnered with the government of Ghana to offer a new education program to marginalized children. The Complementary Basic Education (CBE) program will target out of school children with the aim of teaching them functional literacy within nine months.
Experts estimate that around 440,000 Ghanaian children currently do not attend school. In rural and poor urban areas of the country, many children are reportedly kept out of school to help their families with manual labor, selling goods at market, and rearing cattle. The CBE program plans to reach 120,000 of these children over the next three years, with the intent of integrating them into formal school at the end of their nine-month session.
The CBE program is being called “groundbreaking” by Ghanaian media, as children will be taught reading, writing, and numeracy in their own dialects. Classes are to be held only in the afternoons, to allow for every child to be able to attend.
In Kintampo South and Pru districts the Ghanaian NGO Mission of Hope Society (MIHOSO) has already begun to implement the program. According to Thomas Benarkuu, MIHOSO’s Program Coordinator, the program has demonstrated strong retention and completion rates. Nine hundred out of school children have already been enrolled, he says, including encouraging numbers of female students.
At a festival to mark the launch of the program in the Brong-Ahafo region, Sally Taylor, Ghana’s DFID Country Director, called the program an “important step towards ensuring that every Ghanaian child gets an opportunity to go to school and become the people they have the potential to be.”
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Written by Carla Drumhiller Smith