The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare after Ghana’s Scholarship Secretariat scheduled interviews for 2020/21 academic year applicants has called on the government to improve the local tertiary scholarship scheme.
Mr Kofi Asare’s comment in a post sighted by EducationWeb.com.gh follows the delay in the interviews for the applicants as the 2021 academic year is about to end, a situation he said is to waste the beneficiaries time.
“Many Genuinely needy but brilliant students who required this government scholarship to honour their admissions in various tertiary institutions at the beginning of the academic year are wasting at home now.
The assumption that scholarships will meet the most brilliant but needy, even when disbursed one year after admission or anytime convenient to the bureaucracy is flawed and lazy, since the genuinely poor may not even have the opportunity of becoming students at that time,” he stated.
According to him, social interventions must be modelled to meet the real needs of the brilliant but needy students who most of them are free SHS beneficiaries, at the most critical time, not the convenient time to the bureaucracy.
“If the government’s local tertiary scholarship genuinely targets supporting the needy students, and not just ticking a box, then it requires immediate re-modelling for applications to be submitted immediately after WASSCE results”
The Education Economist said due diligence (including interviews) must be conducted immediately thereafter, and grant advances (especially admission fees) paid upon submission of admission letters to the beneficiaries.
“If President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo really envisions an equitable, increased Gross Tertiary Enrolment from 19% to 40 % by 2030, this is a sin qua non,” the Executive Director of the Education Think Tank noted.