Ghana launches $30M education outcomes fund to get kids into school
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Loading... - Christian Manu
- 27 Mar 2023
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The world’s largest education outcomes fund — $30 million to get out-of-school children into the classroom and improve learning levels at primary schools — has finally kicked off in Ghana.
Over the next four years, the Ghana Education Outcomes Project, or GEOP, aims to get 70,000 out-of-school children back into the classroom and improve learning outcomes for 98,000 children across 600 primary schools.
Most of the work is being done in districts in northern Ghana although the project also aims to tackle pockets of out-of-school children living around the cities of Accra and Kumasi.
Some five years in development, the innovative program is structured as a results-based financing mechanism, which means that the implementers only get paid if they achieve certain, independently verified results. While a few such programs have been tested in education, this is the biggest to date.
However, as with all results-based financing programs, there are risks.
The government of Ghana has pledged $4.5 million to the program with the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office putting up the remaining $25.5 million.
First mooted in 2018, the program suffered delays linked to COVID-19 disruption, fundraising stalls, and a complicated design and structuring process, but was officially launched last month in the capital, Accra.
Speaking at the launch, Senior Presidential Adviser Yaw Osafo-Maafo said that Ghana was proud to host the world’s largest outcomes-based education project, which he called a “remarkable milestone.”
The government was inspired to undertake the project after realizing the country had a “problem” with increasing numbers of out-of-school children and poor learning outcomes, Osafo-Maafo explained. The country’s 2021 census revealed some 1.2 million school-age children in Ghana did not attend school and 940,000 of them had never set foot inside a classroom. Further, World Bank statistics show that those children attending school do not learn much. Read More…
