Africa Education Watch, a non-governmental organisation, has called on the government to depoliticise public scholarships in the nation.
The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, said ongoing development within the scholarship sector is worrying and must be addressed immediately.
In a statement, Asare said transparency is key in awarding public scholarships to brilliant and needy students.
It said: “Moving forward, it is very important to de-politicize the award of scholarships, and ensure fairness and transparency in the process.”
“Knowing how things work in that office, the greatest fear is the likely event of the list of members of the NPP-free SHS graduate association, which was launched a week ago, and whose coordinator is the Head of the Scholarship Secretariat being used as the approved scholarship list.”
“The scholarship secretariat claims to have budgeted GHC20 million for local tertiary scholarships (freshmen). That is great! The said amount, when administered at 4,000/Year, can take care of 5,000 students out of government’s anticipated 200,000 freshmen,” Africa Education Watch further stated.
Africa Education Watch’s statement comes on the heel of a recent announcement by the Scholarships Secretariat that it has been directed by the President, Nana Akufo-Addo, to open its portals for the next two weeks to enable the 2020 graduates of the Free Senior High School programme to apply for scholarship to various tertiary institutions.
Prior to that, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) had also announced it has amended its manifesto to absorb the first term fees of students to all tertiary institutions if it wins the 7 December elections.
However, the Africa Education Watch wants the wholesale granting of scholarships to cease.
“We believe it is better to administer full scholarships to needy students who have no means of enrolling and completing tertiary than administer GHC 1,300/year handouts which takes care of less than 50% academic and residential user fees, putting students at high risk of dropping out.”
Fred Dzakpata
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