Bolgatanga, April 20, GNA – Huge furniture deficit coupled with other infrastructural challenges have been identified as a major cause of poor education at the basic school level in the Bolgatanga Municipality of the Upper East Region.
Most of the pupils at the Kindergarten and Primary schools within the Municipality do not have furniture, compelling them to sit and learn on the bare floor.
“One of the major problems we are faced with is furniture for the Primary schools and especially for the KGs and we don’t have enough resources to buy furniture,” Mr Rex Asanga, Chief Executive, Bolgatanga Municipal Assembly revealed this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Bolgatanga.
The pupils lie on their stomachs to write whenever they are required to do so and the situation posed risk to their health and contributed to their poor performance of students, particularly at the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) level.
While some of the schools do not have enough space to accommodate the increasing number of pupils enrolled each academic year, some of the classrooms were in a dilapidated state and needed refurbishment.
To help address the challenge, the MCE indicated that the Education Oversight Committee which was non-functional for many years had been revived and inaugurated to work with stakeholders to address challenges in the educational sector in the Municipality.
In addition, a committee dubbed, the “MCE Special Initiative Committee”, comprising a group of volunteers who would work on behalf of the Assembly to solicit support from stakeholders and donors to get furniture for the schools and improve quality education.
He said a sample of the furniture design had been made by the Bolgatanga Technical Institute which the Committee would use to solicit support from individuals and groups.
Apart from that, he said, the Assembly would continue to work towards improving the poor infrastructural state of the schools and added that constructions of some classroom blocks were ongoing and would soon be handed over for use.
“Very soon, we will be handing over a three classroom block to the Doringo Junior High School. There is the ongoing construction of a JHS block for the Methodist Primary at Tindonsobligo and we are also mobilising funds to continue a three-classroom block that we started to put up for the Sherigu SHS which somewhere along the line stalled because the contractor abandoned the site,” he added.
Source: Ghana News Agency