GES, Millennium Alliance Sign MoU

The Ghana Education Service (GES) has teamed up with Millennium Promise Alliance (MPA), a non-governmental organization with footprints in more than 20 countries, to scale up the mobile School Report Card (mSRC) to cover all basic schools in the country.

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was on Monday, April 8, 2019, signed between the two parties to that effect.

Per the dictates of the MoU, MPA will assist the GES to map all basic schools in Ghana so that schools under trees as well as those with poor infrastructure will be identified and prioritized.

The agreement will also provides a digitized end-to-end process for collecting real time data concerning pupils, teachers, resources and overall management at the school level.

The Country Director of MPA, Chief Nat Ebo Nsarko, commenting on the initiative prior to the signing of the MoU on behalf of his outfit said he is confident the mapping of all basic schools under trees will help address the controversies surrounding those schools and further assist the government to plan and mobilize enough resources to build school infrastructure in areas where they are lacking.

“…You know we’ve heard a lot of schools under trees. Sometimes you will travel and you would want to see those schools under trees and you may not see them. So, we want to do what we call mapping of the schools so that at the click of a button, you will know where all these basic schools are – if indeed they are under trees, the GPS location will just expose that. I am sure that you will be interested to know how many schools are under trees so that you can address that situation. The records and the data will be there to support you to identify these schools under trees so that we can help”, he noted.

He added “MPA’s support for Ghana’s ICT Policy for Education is intended to coordinate the appropriate development, efficient delivery, and quality use of technology to ensure ICT integration for excellence and equity in education. MPA recognizes the centrality of education to sustainable development, and as many of us are aware, education is a goal in its own right in the SDGs. This initiative is well aligned with Government’s education sector priorities as outlined in the Coordinated Programme of Economic and Social Development Policies 2017-2024”.

In a brief comment at the ceremony, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said he was happy that the organisation had agreed to partner the educational sector to scale up the mSRC to cover all the basic schools in the country.

He made reference to the pilot project carried out by UNICEF and the management of the GES in 20 districts three years ago and said it was time for a scale up to cover all public basic schools.

“The time has come for the scale up with the signing of the MoU,” he said.