He said investing in improving literacy of the future remained the surest way of changing the fortunes of this country, and the government would work to ensure that gains made under the programme were sustained.

Dr Adutwum gave the assurance during the National Close-out ceremony for USAID Partnership for Education Learn­ing in Accra yesterday.

Learning is a nine-year project aligned with the USAID’s global goal of “all children reading” that supported the Ministry of Educa­tion and its affiliated institutions to improve reading performance for early grade pupils.

It was implemented by the FHI360 through four main programmes including; the Early Grade Reading Programme (EGRP), the Transition to En­glish (T2E) Programme, the Na­tional Reading Radio Programme (NRRP), and the T2Eplus.

The project valued at $96.6mil­lion commenced in 2014 and saw to the printing of Learning English teaching and learning ma­terials for non-T2E plus Schools.

Dr Adutwum said it was important that every child in this country irrespective of where they found themselves were given the opportunity to succeed.

He said “I believe that the better days of this nation are ahead of us and not behind us. If we leverage on what we learn from these partnerships especially the partnership that we are celebrating today, we will create a more equita­ble society through education.”

The minister said as “USAID steps out and the country steps up,” managers of the educational systems must know that it was all about accountability and all about outcomes and the process of orientation must end, stressing that “It is no longer tenable to say, I am managing a system, and we have to produce outcomes.”

He said the country could no longer wait for the process of ori­entation to continue, adding that “we need to account to the people of Ghana that we are transform­ing the fortunes of our nation through education.”

“As we do more of that and champion the agenda of the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, we will be able to create a country that can with­stand the shocks of COVID-19 in the future,” he said.

Dr Adutwum said it was im­perative that foundational learning be given the necessary attention because it was key to national development.

On her part, the Mission Director of USAID, Kimberly Rosen expressed her satisfaction with the project implementation and the outcomes.

In all, about 14 million locally developed and context relevant TLMs including Braille had been distributed to over 16,000 prima­ry schools.

In addition over 68,000 teachers, curriculum leads and head teachers were trained using a systematic phonics-based teaching methodology.