NAPO Secures Cuba Deal For Teachers

Ghana’s Minister for Education has announced the country has reached a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the government of Cuba for teachers from the two countries to engage in exchange programmes for training purposes.

 The selected teachers that would benefit for the educative programme, and travel from Ghana to Cuba would be taught subjects like Special Needs Education and Early Grade Teaching.

Also, Cuba, would be sending teachers to Ghana to also transfer knowledge to teachers, as part of the agreement.

The Education Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh aka ‘Napo’, has played a leading role to help secure this positive arrangement to improve the efficiency of teachers.

The Ghana Education Minister said “As I said, I want the Ghana Embassy in Cuba to immediately engage your office as part of our treaty of cooperation agreement.

“These two areas are key, bringing Ghanaian teachers to be trained and sending Cubans to train our teachers. In Ghana, we have schools that train teachers and schools that need teachers”.

Napo is presently with a powerful delegation from his ministry in Cuba, attending the 12th International Congress on Higher Education on behalf of Ghana.

He made the aforementioned remarks when he met with the Cuban Education Minister, Ena Elsa Velazquez Cobiella in Havana, where they had fruitful talks about cooperation.

Napo was of the opinion that Ghana and Cuba should deepen their cooperation agreements, especially in the area of education to help the two countries to develop.

Ms. Velazquez, in his succinct remarks, said her country is ever ready to partner Ghana to improve in Special Needs Education, noting that Cuba has a lot of experts in that area.

“Since the teaching and training of Children with special needs is important, the Cuban system covers such children to age 21”, she said, adding Cuba is ready to help Ghana.

“We are ready with a draft and we will be sending it to the Cuban Embassy in Ghana as we continue to work with the delegation from Ghana”, Ms. Velazquez promised.

According to the Cuban Education Minister, her country was determined to assist Ghana in any way possible so that the two countries would develop their education systems.

Cuba, according to a 2014 report by the World Bank, has the best education system in Latin American and the Caribbean and the only country on the continent to have a high-level teaching faculty.

The World Bank Report also praises Cuba for its success in the fields of education and health, with social services that exceeds those of most developing countries and, in certain sectors, are comparable to those of the developed nations.