NGO educates over 170,000 school dropouts
School for Life (SfL), a non-governmental organization focusing on functional literacy, has over the years provided over 170,000 out-of-school children with functional literacy under the Ghana Complementary Basic Education Programme (CBE).
About 80 per cent of the beneficiaries have so far been integrated into the formal school system, while others are working as professional teachers, nurses, accountants and other endeavours.
Mr. Sulemana Osman Saaka, Programme Manager of SfL who spoke to the GNA in an interview in Tamale on Wednesday said the NGO had made critical strategic contributions towards the development of the CBE as a policy for the Ghana Education Service (GES).
He said the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) this year entered into a partnership with the SfL to provide functional literacy to 120,000 out-of-school children from 2013 to 2016, using the SfL methodology.
The programme manager said the DFID-funded project, also in partnership with other NGOs, would provide an added impetus to the literacy drive in Ghana.
He said the project would be implemented in nine districts in the Northern and Upper West Regions using four local languages, namely Dagbani, Likpakpaaln, Ngbanyeto, all in the Northern Region and Daagare in the Upper West Region.
Mr. Saaka said 10,000 children had so far been enrolled on the programme as of October this year saying, “It was expected that over 90 per cent of them will graduate from the CBE classes and be integrated into the formal schools”.
He stressed the readiness of his outfit to continue to work closely with the GES in the programme’s districts to ensure a smooth transition from the CBE classes into the formal system, saying that it was yet another opportunity for all out of school dropouts to get back to the classroom.
Mr. Saaka appealed to the government to provide budgetary support to sustain the programme after the three-year project period and urged all parents and guardians to consider the programme as a welcome opportunity to the send their wards to school.
Source: GNA