President-elect John Dramani Mahama is concerned about the funding crisis currently affecting Ghana’s education sector, from basic schools to tertiary institutions.

Speaking during an engagement with key stakeholders in the education sector, the president-elect highlighted that the entire educational system is faced with severe financial constraints due to the absence of consistent and dedicated funding.

According to Mahama, there is a need for a consultative forum involving all relevant stakeholders to explore solutions to the funding challenges with the goal of establishing a sustainable funding model that can address the immediate and long-term needs of the sector.

“At the last count, 1.3 million Ghanaian children at the basic level do not have basic furniture to sit and study. And so we have a crisis at the basic level. Even though a lot of money is going to the secondary level, it does not come from a dedicated fund, and there is a lot of waste and inefficiency in the way it is being spent on the Free SHS.

“And then at the same time, tertiary education is also starved of funding because the GETFund that was a good source of funding has been collateralised, and so 60 percent of the GETFund has been spent in advance, and so only 40 percent comes to address infrastructure in the whole educational value chain.

“That is a crisis, and that is why I suggested that we should hold a National Education Review Conference and look at what all the bottlenecks are.”