1,011 SHS infrastructure projects initiated since 2017; Education Minister reveals

Education Minister Matthew Opoku Prempeh has disclosed that the NPP government has initiated 1,011 infrastructural projects in senior high schools across the country since taking office in 2017.

Dr Prempeh made this revelation when he addressed the Nation Building Updates in Accra yesterday on theme “Investing in Education, investing in the Future”.

The weekly programme, organised by the Ministry of Information, featured the Ministry of Education to highlight government’s educational infrastructural drive.

The Minister stated that out of the projects initiated, 492 have been completed, with the rest at various stages of completion.

Funding sources

With respect to the funding sources, he revealed that of the 1,011 projects, 843 were initiated by government through GETFund (of which 382 had been completed); 135 were initiated by the World Bank-funded Secondary Education Infrastructure Project (SEIP), of which 107 have been completed; while 33 were financed by the Kuwaiti Fund, of which 3 have been completed.

The completed projects include 3, 6, 8, 12 and 18-unit classroom blocks, amounting to the creation of 84,600 new seats, arising out of 222 new classroom blocks. Other projects include washroom facilities, rehabilitation works and structures such as assembly halls and laboratories.

Giving the background to this, he stated that the Free Senior High School programme has been accompanied by high demand for certain schools due to the school choice system. He said to ensure that no child is denied access to education, Government has invested in infrastructure to accommodate the extra numbers. In the 2018/19 school year, for instance, the number of Junior High School graduates that enrolled in SHS exceeded the number that enrolled in 2017/18 school year by 30.7 per cent, according to the Minister.

He stated that the gap analysis showed that Government had to create an extra 181,993 spaces in Senior High Schools to accommodate increased numbers of numbers, especially in elite SHS. According to him, as more children gain access to education, there is the need to invest in infrastructure at all levels in order to ensure a conducive learning environment prevails for quality outcomes.

34,416 new seats

He added that a total of 34, 416 new seats have been created in basic schools since 2017.

Dr Prempeh stated that a total of 719 projects have been initiated across all regions in Ghana since 2017, with 252 of them completed.

These are 2-unit classroom blocks for kindergartens, 6-unit classroom blocks for primary, 3-unit classroom blocks for JHS, 9-unit classroom blocks for primary and JHS, and 18-unit classroom blocks for primary and JHS. The totality of these classroom blocks is 34,416 seats.

Other projects he outlined include provision of washroom facilities and rehabilitation works on existing infrastructure nationwide.

He further said the ministry has supplied furniture to basic schools nationwide: dual desks, teacher’s tables with chairs, common room chairs, library tables and chairs and book shelfs, file drawer cabinets, and hexagonal tables and chairs.