Executive director of the Institute for Education Studies (IFEST), Dr Peter Anti, has expressed the need for government to increase capitation grant for basic schools.

According to him, the basic sector has been deprived of much needed resources to ensure efficiency. He revealed that right from 2017, there has been a downward slope in terms of government’s allocation to the education sector.

This, he noted, is worrying because for the country to develop, one of the critical variables the government must pay close attention to is the human capital.

“The fundamentals should be the focus. So, we’re thinking that the government should reconsider the total allocation process. First and foremost, look at the capitation grant. The capitation grant was increased to GHC10 but look at the rate of inflation.
“So, if you juxtapose the rate of inflation with the increment in the capitation grant, it still comes to nothing because you cannot run the schools with that amount of money. So, we are looking at a situation whereby the capitation grant will be increased further, maybe to GHC15 or GHC20, and that should be disbursed accordingly.”
Dr Peter Anti

Challenges within basic education sector

Highlighting the challenges within the basic education sector, Dr Anti indicated that for the human capital to contribute more to the growth of the economy, government needs to invest in it. With this, he lamented that government is not investing more in the human capital.

“Interestingly if you even look at that allocation, you will see that only 17.1% goes into capital expenditure that looks at the building of schools and ensuring that we have infrastructure and providing the needed resources for schools to run…”
Dr Peter Anti

Contrarily, Dr Anti stated that senior high school education takes almost 47.89% of the share of the budget that is supposed to go into goods and services and CAPEX, whereas basic education receives a paltry 4.43%.

This, he explained, also gives an idea of the priority of government, being that a lot of investment is not being channeled in the basic education sector.

“The basic education has been starved of resources and infrastructure. In fact, if you study the data from the ministry of education for the period of this government, you’ll see a downward slope in terms of the nature of infrastructure for our basic education. In other words, you’ll see a complete deterioration of infrastructure at the various public basic schools that we have… That is worrying, it means that we are not investing much in our basic sector, and we are pushing a lot of money in the senior high school level…”
Dr Peter Anti

In light of the priority given senior high schools in the 2023, the executive director for IFEST revealed that going forward, that kind of focus on secondary must change. He however explained that government is prioritizing senior high schools because of its interest in free senior high school.

“But that has a big effect on our basic education which is now in complete disarray. So, we are expecting that as we move into a budget era, there will be a reconsideration of this imbalance in terms of the allocation of resources first and foremost, in the education sector…”
Dr Peter Anti