Casely-Hayford Proposes Free SHS Bond

Financial Analyst, Sydney Casely-Hayford has advised the Akufo-Addo government to issue a bond in a bid to support the free Senior High School programme.

Making the suggestion on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue on Saturday, Mr. Casely-Hayford said, the bond will enable government solve the teething challenges that have bedeviled the programme since its implementation.

“This is fundamental. This is financing and accounting 101,” he said.

The programme has since its inception recorded some setbacks in terms of infrastructure, a problem government says is working hard to address.

As part of the many other means of addressing the problem, the government announced the setting up of a fund to receive voluntary contributions from individuals to support the implementation of its flagship free SHS programme, and the education sector as a whole.

According to Casely-Hayford, the bond will create additional funding for the programme, apart from its “meager” budgetary allocation drawn from Ghana’s oil revenue.

The financial analyst said, if he were to be government, “What I will do is that, I will float a particular bond basically for developing education infrastructure and keep it completely separate from our annual budget funding amount which I will use to pay for my free SHS expenses.”

“I will use that for infrastructural development. At the end of the day, who buys the bond? They are investors from outside and you and me. We will buy the bond and we will give enough capital and that money will be paid to us over a longer period of time,” he explained.

What is a bond?

In finance, a bond is a fixed income investment in which an investor loans money to an entity (typically corporate or governmental) which borrows the funds for a defined period of time at a variable or fixed interest rate.