Accra, Ghana//-The World Bank’s Managing Director (MD) of Operations, Ms Anna M. Bjerde who is in Ghana for a two-day working visit today toured New Gbawe Municipal Basic 1 M.A Primary School, and Accra Digital Centre in the Greater Accra Region.
Ms Bjerde and her team including World Bank Vice President for Western and Central Africa, Ousmane Diagana, and the World Bank Country Director for Ghana, Pierre Frank Laporte were at the school which is one of the beneficiaries of the World Bank’s funded Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP) to assess the impact of the project on the lives of the pupils.
Another objective of their tour of the school was to see how firsthand activities at the school level were implemented under the $150 million GALOP.
Welcoming Ms Bjerde and her entourage to the school, the New Gbawe Municipal Director of Education, Charles Odoom said out of the total number over 300 public and private schools in the municipality, seven public schools are beneficiaries of the GALOP.
He was happy to say that the project has improved teaching and learning in the New Gbawe Municipal Basic 1 M.A Primary School as well as other schools in the municipality.
On his part, a Deputy Minister of Education, Rev John Ntim-Fodjour said the New Gbawe Municipal Basic 1 M.A Primary School is one of the great schools that the World Bank supports, and is transforming under the GALOP.
“This school is having 500 pupils who by the benevolent of the World Bank have benefitted from the GALOP project. GALOP has been a phenomenal project”.
Rev Ntim-Fodjour noted that “for the past few years, we have over 10,000 schools which have benefitted from the GALOP project, and these were schools that were identified as the least performing schools to receive that transformation.
Not just transformation but transforming every aspect of our education outcomes in these schools. New Gbawe Municipal Basic 1 M.A Primary School is one of them”.
According to him, the success story of GALOP is told with the mentioning of New Gbawe Municipal Basic 1 M.A Primary School and many thousands of schools across the country which have received major transformations and outcomes improving.
“So, today if Ghana has improved its success story, thanks to the World Bank and the commitment to the team in ensuring that all the support we have received from the World Bank particularly under the GALOP project has been judiciously put into good use”.
So, we are very much enthused about this project, and we are excited about the transformation that we have seen in the over 10,000 basic schools now becoming the highest performing schools we have in the country, improving literacy, numeracy, and even improving the creativity abilities of our pupils, he stated.
Addressing the pupils, teachers, officials of the Ministry of Education, Ghana Education Service, staff of World Bank, Ms Bjerde said she wasso delighted to hear that the GALOP approach has been successful across Ghana and in different schools.
“The World Bank is absolutely delighted to be partnering with the Ministry of Education and with all the counterparts and stakeholders in Ghana to help work on this model of development project”.
Learning losses
She said before COVID-19 they were tracking data of 10-year-old children to see how many 10-year-old children in the world had a difficult time reading a story that was appropriate for their age and understanding it fully.
So, reading the story and then being able to comprehend it and synthesize the story.
“For developing countries, low-income and low middle-income countries around the world, 57% of those 10-year-old children actually had difficulty.
That was the high number that failed and gave us a reason before COVID-19 to really focus and continue to focus on education and learning and actually trying to quantify and understand whether children were learning”, Ms Bjerde explained.
After COVID-19, they had reassessed that number and it was not a good outcome. They now put the number at 70%.
She added: “That is seven out of 10 children at the age of 10 have a tough time reading a story and fully comprehending it. It doesn’t mean that they don’t understand a bit but that full and complete ability to take the story and really synthesize it afterwards with full understanding has a big gap”.
From 57% to 70%, and this spanned across countries that are low-income and countries that start to become middle-income countries.
So, it is a learning crisis in her view that the world is facing, worst in poor countries but still an issue around the world that has become a pre-occupation of the World Bank in all the countries that we are working in, she noted.
The World Bank’s MD of Operations noted that Ghana rates quite high on the Human Development Capital Index that they track which is great.
National Standardised Testing
She was delighted to hear about the outcomes according to the National Standardised Testing.
After that in December 2021, Ghana conducted the National Standardised Test which is a nationwide test which was admitted first across Grade 4 or Primary four (P4) learners.
Explaining further, Rev Ntim-Fodjour said: “We started with our public schools. Following year (2022), we conducted it across both public and private schools for P2 and P4.
The outcomes of our National Standardised Test were that 54% of learners around the age of 10 are able to read proficiently at the P2 and P4 level”. For numeracy, it was below 46% of learners in terms of their numeracy skills at P2 and P4 level were deficient.
That was below literacy. But 54% is not where we want to get to. Our strategic target minimum is 90% of learners at the age of 10 are able to read proficiently at the grade level.
But we measured so far at 54%. That goes to show a good improvement. It shows that if seven out of 10 children are not able to read for understanding within the categories of nations that we fall under, ours is a good improvement”.
Accra Digital Centre
At the Accra Digital Centre, the World Bank’s entourage was met by the management of the Centre which is the government mini technology park under the Ministry of Communications with the mandate to drive Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the country.
The Centre was partly funded by the World Bank. Also, the Innovation Centre at the Accra Digital Centre, comprising an Innovation Hub (Ghana Innovation Hub) and a mobile Applications Lab (Ghana Tech Lab) under the Innovation module of the eTransform Ghana Project was funded by a World Bank grant.
The tour began at the Mobile Applications Lab of the Centre (Ghana Tech Lab) which is managed by an Innohub-Kumasi Hive joint venture, where Ms Bjerde and her team visited the Creative Space, Training room, Maker Space, Co-working space and interacted with incubatees and trainees who shared their training experiences with Ms Bjerde.
They continued the tour in the Innovation Hub of the Centre (Ghana Innovation Hub), managed by an MDF West Africa, Bluespace and Ghana Technology University Consortium, where they interacted with more incubatees and Tech startups.
The team also visited the Business Process Outsourcing Cluster, where they interacted with Management and agents of Ayo intermediaries and lastly to the technology SME Cluster where they interacted with firms like Kudigo which is into Fintech solutions.
Ms Bjerde and her team were impressed by the activities of the Centre. The Accra Digital Centre according to officials has now been oversubscribed with some 40 technology companies on-board, creating more than 2000 digital and ancillary jobs.
Ms Bjerde pledged more assistance for the Centre in the future and encouraged managers and incubatees and trainees to keep it up.
