Bawumia charges Africa to prepare 4th Industrial Revolution

Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia has charged African countries to learn best practices from one another and the rest of the world, especially in the areas of education and skills acquisition, to prepare adequately for the changing dynamics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Delivering the opening address at a World Bank-organised Ministerial Meeting on Education for West and Central Africa in Accra on Monday, he said while individual countries were rolling out educational reforms, collaboration would scale up the rate of adoption of such reforms. He added that it would also have a greater effect on their quest to build a strong human resource base.

“We will not be able to deliver change without building and sustaining political momentum in the region. In many of the region’s countries, more efforts are needed to rationalise the governance of education systems to achieve greater coherence, cooperation, and coordination,” he said.

“Indeed, the relationship between socioeconomic development and human capital is critical and Ghana’s policies on education access, quality, equity, relevance, skills acquisition, and education financing reflect how Ghana is using education as a lever for human capital development and socio-economic transformation,” Dr. Bawumia pointed out.

Reforms

The Vice-President outlined an extensive list of ongoing reforms in Ghana’s education sector, and called for cross-pollination of ideas on ways to make such reforms even better.

“As is the case of several other countries in West and Central Africa, Ghana has introduced several key policies and reforms to strengthen education quality and management across the education sector… Ghana’s education reform agenda can benefit from collaboration and synergy with our regional partners. That is what this conference must explore to spur up the collective growth of the continent because, as Helen Keller once said, ‘alone we can do so little, together we can do so much’,” he said.

Commending Ghana for the successes chalked so far in her education reforms, the World Bank Vice-President for Western and Central Africa, Ousmane Diagana, said the Bank’s 2022-2025 Education Strategy was designed to meet the needs of the youth of the continent. He assured of his organisation’s continued support for, among others, reducing learning poverty – the share of 10-year-olds who are unable to read and understand a short text – which affects more than 80 percent of children across the region, the highest rate in the world.