Yaw Osafo Marfo, Senior Advisor to the President, has confirmed that free SHS will not be cut off while the government seeks an IMF bailout.
According to him, the government is in talks with the IMF, and free SHS will not be affected.
Yaw Osafo Marfo, speaking at the National Education Week at the Accra International Conference Centre, stated that the IMF, as an institution, believes in education, so how can the IMF ask you to abolish free SHS?
“Most of the developed countries have free High Schools, we are taking the right path towards development, and I can assure you that the IMF will not touch the free SHS”, he reiterated.
Between 2019 and 2020, the government spent an average of 4.5% to 4.6% of its GDP and 17.6% to 24% of its national budget on education, he said.
” The share of government expenditure on education increased marginally from 73.4 per cent in 2019 to 74.0 per cent in 2020,” he noted.
“I reject as false the argument that our economy cannot support these programmes. The challenges we are witnessing in our economy are short-term and we cannot afford to sacrifice our common vision due to short-term economic pressures.
“I must say that the debate should not be whether our public expenditure is too high or too low. The debate should be and must be whether or not these programmes contribute to the welfare of Ghanaians and are essential for our national transformation,” he said.
In his view, the policy had promoted access to secondary education and that enrolment at the SHS had increased from less than 900,000 students in the 2016/17 academic year to more than 1.2 million in 2020/21.
The Gross Enrollment Rate at SHS has increased to 95% in 2020/21, up from 50% in the pre-free SHS year of 2016/17.
Over the medium term, the transition rate from Junior High School three to SHS one has increased from 78.2 percent in 2017/18 to more than 85 percent in 2020/21, he argued.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
