The $1.2m World Bank grant for digital literacy would be channeled towards funding impoverished basic schools located across the country, according to Ghana’s Minister of Education Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum.
Adutwum stated that the funds will be utilized to improve the learning environment by providing furniture and teaching and learning resources.
He went on to say that as a condition precedent to the World Bank disbursing the grant, the Ministry of Education funded the teachers’ digital literacy project with its own funds, and that the replaced funds could be used to improve infrastructure in basic schools, including those described as “schools under trees.”
“I have been able to do the project with zero cost to the government. I’ve used existing resources, leveraged the government’s expenditure on the one-teacher, one-laptop initiative and used that platform to accomplish something that was not done before I took over” he explained.
The teachers’ digital literacy initiative, according to Dr. Adutwum, is planned to train 40,000 teachers in digital literacy, triggering a World Bank release of $1.2 million under the Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP).
He added, however, that he executed the project by utilizing an existing federal educational platform rather than paying for the creation of a new platform, which would have cost the government around $200,000.
More than 41,000 teachers were trained in computer literacy as a result of this, he added, emphasising that the $1.2 million from the World Bank remained safe at the bank.
According to Dr. Adutwum, the World Bank’s project finance has changed significantly.
“In recent years, it has decided to no longer hand over a pot of money and say ‘use it to do this or that’ because of corruption. So what it does is ‘Resource let funding, ‘” he explained.
Adutwum also stated that in the instance IT training of teachers, it was a grant linked to a loan.
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SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES
