According to Africa Education Watch, the main obstacle to senior high school education in Ghana is a lack of funds.
In an interview with Alfred Ocansey on the 3FM Sunrise Morning Show, Mr. Kofi Asare, Executive Director for Africa Education Watch, stated that senior high schools are currently experiencing a food scarcity due to the extremely sluggish and erratic disbursement of funding. The area of the free senior high school that is most impacted when money is disbursed slowly or irregularly is feeding. This is due to the fact that about 70% of the Free SHS funding is spent on food.
"Funding is the only issue; disbursement of cash sanctioned by the ministry of finance is proving to be quite challenging, and that is the only problem," he claimed. why we are doing this interview. If you pay close attention, the free senior high school initiative received more than 2 billion cedis in budgetary approval from Parliament, according to information provided by the finance and education ministries.
"National Buffer Stock, the organisation in charge of organising the supply of food, owes its suppliers about three hundred million (GHS 300,000,000) cedis as of right now, with some of the suppliers being owing as far back as October last year," Mr. Asare added.
According to him, having money owed to suppliers for around six months locks up their capital, making it exceedingly challenging for them to get money to buy and provide additional items. The ministry of education has an alternatively effective way to guarantee successful food distribution and buffer stock, but doing so would cost money.
The ministry of education gave stakeholders assurances during the previous shortage that the cash flow analysis and projection was the issue, and that they had completed a more realistic analysis and projection, which they had sent to the ministry of finance to follow for prompt disbursement. Regrettably, the issue reappeared just six weeks after the assurance, though.
He reiterated his claim that there has been a food scarcity at the SHS for some time, pointing out that the Upper East CHASS had written to the GES two weeks earlier to warn them of the situation. In order to ensure that suppliers are paid and schools have food to feed their students, the executive director of Eduwatch revealed that an average of 1.3 billion cedis is spent on food for FSHS annually. As a result, the ministry of finance is required to spend roughly 100 million cedi (GHS 100,000,000) each month.
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