Some stakeholders in Ghana’s educational sector have kicked against the flagbearer of the opposition NDC, John Dramani Mahama’s campaign promise to pay the academic user facility fee component of all Level 100 students’ fees if elected.
Mr. Mahama as part of his manifesto for the youth has announced that all Level 100 students will benefit from a policy that will ensure that their academic user facility fees are absorbed by his government.
With this policy, Mr. Mahama and the NDC aim to ease the financial burden of all Ghanaians who gain admission to the various tertiary institutions across the country.
But with the wholesale nature of the policy, as announced by the former president, some stakeholders are raising doubt over the doability insisting that such a policy is bound to encounter serious challenges.
The University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) is of the view that such funds could be channeled to provide infrastructure and other facilities in the tertiary institutions to benefit the students. The President of UTAG, Prof. Mahamoud Akudugu explains that the policy will be of no proper benefit to the students if there is no infrastructure to accommodate them.
He further calls for the policy to be based on equity where the funds are given to the tertiary institutions that will identify needy students deserving of support.
“So if you are proposing a policy of this nature and there is no provision for infrastructure and the rest of it, then at the end of the day, the students will come and there is no place to sit,” Prof. Akudugu noted.
He added that ” this policy should be targeted for equity and besides that, we would have even preferred that this is given as bursaries and scholarships or grants to the universities to administer because they will be able to know who are the needy students based on their history. It should be targeted because that is the only way to create equity when it comes to these types of policies.”
Siding with the position of UTAG, the Executive Director of the Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare believes the equity distribution of such a pro-poor policy is the best practice all over the world. “The best practice in Western countries dictate that for bursaries and financial assistant schemes to benefit students, the universities are the ones who must administer them and then report to the scholarship authority,” he added.
