by Jan Buresh

This summer, I traveled to Ghana where the countryside is lush, with few roads, basic housing, and generous people, as a Farmer-To-Farmer volunteer in a USAID program. My assignment was to work with fellow bankers located in rural areas with one bank in such a remote area, it was not even on the map. Since I grew up in Michigan in farm country and have worked in the area of farm finance, I was to focus on teaching them tools to make smarter loans to farmers. What this actually means is being able to get money to the farmer when they need it and in the amount that they can repay.

Most of my work takes place in bank conference rooms with an occasional goat walking in and spray-painted chickens pecking outside. Their “highlighter colors” identify their owners.
Much is unpredictable, starting with uneven stair rises and intermittent cell phone reception. I’m taken aback by the wide-eyed disbelief at my ignorance of not knowing the day of the week of my birth. They all know their days because each person is given a name to match their day. For example, Efia is a common name for a women born on Friday.
To my unexpected delight, my hotel showed the opening ceremony of the Olympics by hooking up a generator to a computer. Also, during my stay, their president died. The transition was smooth even while most of the population was in shock.
Daily I wake at 5 to sounds of roosters. Church bells ring from 5:30 followed by prayer calls. By 6, women with perfect posture walk to market balancing baskets of huge yams on their heads. They are the elite women. By 7:30 kids in ironed, orange and brown school uniforms pop out of their dirt-walled homes to walk to school. Kids appear precocious because they are older than they look. They call out “good morning white man” to me and I reply “mah chee” which is “good morning” in Twi, the local language.
Each morning women sweep the same clay areas outside their homes then pound cassava in tubs for cooking on charcoal. Because it is harvest time, women sit in groups on piles of corn for days. They remove husks, toss cobs in a pile and wait for a machine to come to remove kernels. Babies are wrapped on their backs and small children play nearby. Men work in fields with hoes and machetes and mix concrete by hand. In early evening, enterprising kids wave where the road narrows. They ask for money because they worked to fill pot-holes in the road

Ghanaians are generous and enthusiastic. My well-being is monitored by daily calls from my three lead bankers plus a catering school teacher who brought me meals for a week in a town with no restaurant. One family took me on a village tour to their friends’ businesses, the commercial corn market, an outdoor 3-day funeral with 80 red or black plastic chairs, and to the round hut of the village chief where he practices their traditional religion. The mom is a leader of women yam sellers, the dad founded the local grain market and the son is a university student. At the end of the day, the family and I watch the Olympics, have dinner on the lawn of my hotel, and discuss the challenges and possibilities for agriculture in the region.
The common discussion topic between Farmer-To-Farmer volunteers on this trip is education. The schooling of most of our clients has been largely rote and many university graduates tend to think linearly. Little is written down,so few records, policies or plans exist. Two accountant volunteers are in awe of how much a local business accomplishes without written records. I learn that analysis, priorities, trade-offs, and risk prevention are rarely used in everyday business. When ‘my’ bankers use these tools they are impressed with the results of their own work. And I am impressed by how they have mastered these concepts.
The Farmer-To-Farmer program is funded by USAID to send volunteers to developing countries. Work is serious with statements of work and deliverables. Our tax-payer money buys technical training for people who can produce food security for their country. If you want to apply your skills and do some unique travel, you may volunteer through websites for Farmer-To-Farmer: ACDIVOCA.org, Winrock.org and CNFA.org.

http://www.foresthillsconnection.com/style/what-i-did-this-summer-farmer-to-farmer-volunteer-in-rural-ghana/

All too soon another election cycle is with us. Political parties have started presenting their policies to the electorate with the hope of being elected into government. The promise of these parties has always been that of helping the electorate realise their aspirations. Since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, all political parties, including my own party, the National Democratic Congress, seem to prescribe an economic policy that recognises the critical need to invest in infrastructure and the Ghanaian people. But to what extent have political parties been honest with their prescriptions?

The purpose of this article is to have a look at one key investment that can make Ghana more competitive in the global economy and which has become a subject matter for public discourse - investment in education. May I, however, emphasise that I do not pretend to have all the answers, but I can offer a few examples of where we can break free of our current educational stalemate; places where, in line with the tradition of our first president, Dr Nkrumah, we can begin to modernise and rebuild the social contract that must exist between elected officials and the citizenry.

Since independence, education has been at the heart of a bargain Ghana makes with its citizen: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a better life. And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Bongo has to compete not just with a child from Bosomtwi but with millions of children in London, Bangalore and Rio de Janeiro, too many Ghanaian schools are not holding up their end of the bargain.

As a people we have become used to stories of many Ghanaian children languishing in schools that can’t prepare them for the world of work. Ghana has an unacceptable high school dropout rate especially in the rural areas. By their senior secondary year, most of these students score very low on maths and science testing; many teenagers can’t understand basic fraction; about the same proportion of nine year olds can’t perform basic multiplication or division (16th June 2008 edition of Daily Graphic) and according to the Report of the Presidential Committee set by former President Kufuor (the Anamoah Mensah Report), although more students, in terms of absolute numbers, progress from the pre-tertiary level to the tertiary level, those lucky students constitute about 10% of the original number that would have started in basic one.

I don’t hold the view that government alone can turn this situation around. Parents have a fundamental responsibility for instilling an ethics of hard work and educational achievement in their wards. But parents rightly expect their government, through the public schools, to serve as full partners in the educational process.

Unfortunately, instead of innovation and bold reform of our schools- the reforms that would allow the kids in Bunkpurugu to compete for jobs at Tullow, Valco, Bank of Ghana, to mention but a few- what we’ve seen from government for close to a decade has been tinkering around the edges and a tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result of a type of politics that is as outdated as it is predictable. There are many people both in and outside government who argue that taking cognisance of the fact that government spends between 30 to 40% of its recurrent budget on education the lack of funding cannot be the reason for the poor standards of education; that the problems in the public schools are caused by hapless bureaucracies and intransigent unions like NAGRAT, GNAT, TEWU etc; and that the only solution is to break up these unions and liberate our schools from these people who do not have the interest of our children at heart. There are those including the New Patriotic Party who equally subscribe to the view that more spending alone will improve educational outcomes.

Both positions, in my humble opinion are wrong. Money does matter in education- otherwise why would parents spend fortunes to keep their kids in private schools and many urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate equipment and teachers are forced to pay out of their pockets for basic materials like chalk. But there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least a big a problem as how well they’re funded.

Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student achievement, fund them adequately and eliminate those programmes that do not produce results. And in fact we seem to already have hard evidence of reforms that work; a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on maths and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn; early childhood education for every child, so they’re not already behind on their first day of school; meaningful performance based assessment that can provide a fuller picture of how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of transformative heads of schools and more effective teachers.

The last point- the need for effective teachers – deserves special attention. Recent studies suggest that the single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the village he/she comes from or what religion he/she belongs to, but who the child’s teacher is. Unfortunately too many of our schools, especially in the rural areas depend on inexperienced teachers (pupil teachers) with little training in the subjects they’re teaching and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools. Moreover, the situation is getting worse not better. Each year, experienced teachers reach their retirement age and the lack of replacement of these retirees has made the teacher deficit phenomenal.

The problem isn’t that there’s no interest in teaching. As a person who has taught before, I have constantly come across young and intelligent people who after graduation have been posted to teach in very rural schools and it’s no gainsaying, that these young teachers go through trying moments. However, they find the work extraordinarily rewarding and the kids they teach benefit from their creativity and enthusiasm. But by the end of two years, most of these teachers either change carriers (source: GNA, 16 June, 2008) or move to urban schools – a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the education bureaucracy and a pervasive feeling of isolation. If we are serious in building a twenty-first-century educational system, we must take the teaching profession more seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow, for instance, a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional coursework; pairing up new recruits with master teachers (mentors) to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.

It also means paying teachers what they are worth. There is however one catch. In exchange for more money teachers need to become more accountable for their performance – and district/municipal/metropolitan directors of education need to have greater power and ability to get rid of ineffective teachers. Observing the labour front in Ghana, my best bet is that teacher unions would resist the idea of pay for performance. This may be because it could be disbursed at the whim of an authorised person. The union could argue – rightly so – that most districts will solely rely on test scores to measure teacher performance and that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like the number of low-income or special needs students in their classroom.

But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with NAGRAT, GNAT, District/Municipal/Metropolitan Assemblies and various District Directorates of education can develop better measures of performance, one that combine test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good and which are really bad). And we can make sure those non-performing teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn. Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to salvage our educational system we must cultivate the faith that suggest that every child can learn. And to translate this faith into reality, we must begin to consider the option of expanding access and improve quality of instruction in pre-tertiary schools. Our basic school level is currently free and compulsory and we must ensure that the word free literary means free. The State must begin to also intervene in some aspects of the secondary/technical/vocational school levels with regard to teaching and learning materials, provision of science laboratories etc. These interventions can be achieved not because we have discovered oil as Nana Akuffo-Addo, the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party suggested in his recent IEA encounter, but because a reduction in the cost of running government, reduction of public corruption and setting our priorities right can make funds available for this exercise.

Our investments in education can’t end with an improved elementary and secondary education system. In a global economy which is increasingly becoming knowledge based and where eight of the nine fastest growing occupation require scientific or technological skills, most Ghanaian workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future. Our government must indeed help today’s workforce to truly adjust to twenty-first century realities.

In many ways our task seems very huge, considering that, policy makers have neglected our universities and polytechnics over the years. Our tertiary institutions are ill equipped to take on many students. And these policy makers and indeed the generality of Ghanaians don’t need to be convinced of the value of a higher education. This can be seen in the number of young adults getting bachelor’s degrees and HNDs. This is why the call to use the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) for what it was established to do couldn’t have been more right. There must be a heavy injection of funds into these institutions especially the polytechnics that have a mission to produce the middle level human capital that Ghana so much needs.

Another area Ghanaians do need help immediately is in managing the rising cost of tertiary education – something I am, as a former NUGS president, very much familiar with. Over the last decade the average cost of tertiary education has risen astronomically. To absorb this cost parents and students have been taking on ever-increasing debt levels, which is discouraging students from pursuing careers in less lucrative fields like teaching. And a large number of university-qualified students each year choose to forgo university altogether because they simply can’t figure out how to pay the bills.

There are a number of steps to control cost and improve access to higher education. Government can limit the annual tuition fee increases at public universities and polytechnics and vote more money through the GETFund to cater for the deficit. For non-traditional students, online courses and the already existing distance education may provide a cost-effective option for retooling in a constantly changing economy. Students must also insist that their institutions focus their fund-raising efforts more in improving the quality of instruction than buying luxurious vehicles for the vice chancellors, heads of faculties and their spouses.

But no matter how well we do in controlling the spiralling cost of tertiary education we still need to provide many students and parents with more direct help in meeting university expenses, whether through grants, low interest loans, or tax-free educational savings accounts (i.e. if we tax our savings accounts as a country).

There is one other aspect of our education – one that can and should speak to the core of Ghana’s competitiveness. Our tertiary institutions must serve as the nation’s primary research and development laboratories. These tertiary institutions must train innovators of the future – from the discovery of an effective way of preventing malaria and guinea worm to improved ways in agriculture – with government providing critical support for infrastructure and the funds for research that may not have an immediate commercial application, but that can lead ultimately to scientific breakthroughs.

I am not naïve that these proposals will need a large dose of capital. But I believe as a country we can and must do this. Our first step is to amend the GETFund act. At its present form, the Commissioner of the VAT service is mandated to pay these monies into the consolidated fund for onwards transfer into the GETFund account. This current practice has enabled governments to have access to this fund and in its rather short life; the fund has been applied differently from what it is meant for. An amendment therefore allowing the Commissioner to pay the GETFund component of the VAT receipts directly into its account can forestall this challenge.

The fight against public sector corruption should not just be a cliché. There must be a commitment from all government to fight that. Can we imagine the number of billions of Cedis we will realise if we are able to prevent people from dipping their hands into the national kitty? Last but not the least; we must have our priorities right. What is the moral justification for building palaces for the President when we have critical issues in the education sector to solve? In other words we can afford to do what needs to be done. What is missing is not money but a national sense of urgency.

RexZone

In William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the greatest blow, Julius Caesar suffered, was at the hands of his bosom friend, Brutus, hence the popular saying: ET tu Brutus! Just like the Holy Bible, Jesus Christ was betrayed by a person close to him; Judas Iscariot! I believe these same words were often repeated by our late President, John Evans Atta Mills, each time his people from his own political party verbally abused his intelligence and personality. The very people, who held up his hands in acknowledgement, let him down in the end! It was perhaps the beginning of his end! For most of us, the issue of the passing of our late president is one that would forever make us uncomfortable or perhaps, hunt us, considering the fact that in our own various ways, we feel responsible, and perhaps, guilty of our individual contributions to the grief and pain he must have always experienced one way or the other!

Yes, this is a bitter truth that would forever hunt most people, especially in the NDC! The truth is bitter but I cannot say otherwise! A lot of people would prefer not to go into the issues of the last three-years and the death of this great man! They prefer not to revisit the past but as we all know, the past helps in shaping our future! If the NDC would indeed attain greater heights, they need to work on the assignment of accepting their various roles and contributions in the discrediting of the governance of the late President Mills! If perhaps this man was indeed unable to perform as has been publicly and widely proclaimed and acclaimed by his own people; the Judases, I believe the channels used in addressing these were far from pleasant! Valuable lessons ought to be learnt by all!

From the very onset, President Mills never had the full support and cooperation of his party, to even consider sympathizers or opposition! For their own personal interest perhaps, most of his own people saw him as weak and incapable! I never really saw any weakness in this man but others did! What is the measure of weakness? Clemency and perhaps being humane is no substitute for a weakness! Clearly, this man had his priorities and saw nothing else! Whatever choices this man made, was usually met with a pandemonium! The picture usually painted by the NDC was as though this man had no clue as to whatever he was doing! Ironically though, these were the same people who gave him the node in becoming a flag bearer for the party, and yet in the end, these same people saw him spent each day in making his tenure a living hell! The same people! Each day, it was one attack after the other! From the propagandas to the death calls! The painful aspect of this whole ordeal was the fact that this man was dragged into the dirty game of politics by these Judases, and yet in the end, he was brutally assaulted and betrayed by these same Judases! As humans, we have our own various unpleasant experiences and encounters with the Judases. What was the story? What was the feeling?

As has been biblically stated; the stone that the builders rejected became the corner stone! Yes, President Mills was always the source and object of ridicule in our political stream within the past decade. For a fact, he was the underdog for most people! Even during the campaigns, his manner of campaigning was always an issue of ridicule; the one-on-one campaign strategy. However slow the tortoise walks, it eventually reaches its destination. In the end President Mills proved himself beyond all doubt and much to the surprise of all, including his own political party when he won the race for the presidential elections against all odds! Does that not represent greatness achieved? I am sure that for several months after the elections, this man could not have believed his luck. I am sure a lot of us still cannot believe the fact that this seemingly timid personality, emerged winner above all the other seemingly more vibrant competitors. That is the spice of life! Rather sadly however, this was the beginning of his predicaments!

Any political party that emerges as winner in any elections should indeed celebrate this. For the NDC however, it was the exact opposite. A selected number, well-wishers, friends, and sympathizers, perhaps of the late president celebrated his victory! For the others however, it was a moment of mourning and cursing! This was his political party! Right from the word go, the late President Mills was discredited by the NDC! This man received no peace, for every single day that he sat on his presidential seat, from some so-called high ranked members of his own sect! Comparatively, the actual opposition party comported themselves better! It was usually confusing when members of his own party criticized him to the advantage of his opponents! Anyone would have easily identified these Judases as being a part of the opposition. His own party was doing the job of the opposition better than the actual opposition! If some members of NDC were in themselves unsure of the competence of their flag bearer, did we expect others to do otherwise? Of course not!

Constructive criticism is always lauded but what some members of the NDC exhibited was sheer jealousy! Dirty linen should not be washed in public! Indeed, I sometimes wondered how this man must have felt! Julius Caesar felt the deepest pain when his own closest friend stabbed him in the novel, Julius Caesar. Each day that the late President Mills lived, I am very sure that he must have felt that pain repeatedly, anytime he had to listen to all the insults he had to bear from his own political family! A house divided among itself will definitely not stand and yet, this great man tried in his own way to keep this house together. As his trademark, he never responded! He never retaliated! He kept his silence, even when he was insulted! Even when he was battling his illness, he still labored hard, in his own little way to keep the sinking ship afloat!

No man would definitely love to be in the situation that the late President found himself. To have been surrounded by people, who were only looking forward to his downfall! The few true friends he had, I believe, served him well in their own ways! This is an experience we must all fight to change! Politics is based on ideologies! It is only about the difference in ideologies and for this, we have varied political parties. For the good of this nation, our various political parties must learn to work together for a greater good, other than themselves! The breakups in most political parties, in recent past have usually been as a result of a little conflict of ideas as a result of the conflict of interests! We must learn to look beyond our differences! The politics of selfishness should in no way be condoned! Politics does not give anyone the leverage to say insulting and hurtful things to others, in the name of freedom of speech and democracy! For a fact in this country, most people would be found wanting should they be called upon by any law court to defend at any time statements made and certain utterances!

The people we vote into power require and deserve our cooperation and goodwill and not just our endorsement or thumbprint! In the end, their success or failure affects us all! We should be mindful of our utterances! No matter the difference in political ideologies, we need to stand united and pray for the successes of each government, elected into power! Right from the onset, most people saw the late president as incapable of leading this nation. These emotions were reflected in our utterances! On the radio, television, on our streets, in our homes and work places, the comments were made! And yet in the end, we expected more from this man! No man is capable of leading this nation unless they have our full cooperation and prayers or perhaps, goodwill!

A lot of things have gone wrong within the past years in our political domain and within our various political parties! For most of us, hard lessons have been learnt! The sudden demise of the late President Mills left us all in shock, and still does! Our deepest regrets can be attributed to the fact that this man in truth, never had our full support and blessings! Most people only got to appreciate this great personality after his demise. The country has been blessed with a new president who needs our well-wishes. We owe it to him, and most importantly, to our beloved nation to give him our full support!

Elections are around the corner and for a fact, a winner would be declared. How far this person goes whether successfully or disappointingly depends on us all! As a people, let us learn to put aside our difference in opinions and most importantly, our difference in political ideologies for the good of this nation. We indeed need a positive attitude in order to succeed. Although there might be differences, let us learn to convey our ideas in a more positive and constructive way rather than the carelessness and callousness that have been exhibited in recent past. Let the lessons we have learnt in the past weeks influence our thoughts and actions. In the end, all that we do should be in the interest of our beloved nation. Ghana! Above all, let us be mindful of the fact that our children are watching and learning! No one knows tomorrow!