Basic Education at Risk: IMANI Engages
The IMANI Center for Policy & Education held a policy engagement with the Ministry of Education.
The meeting, led by Franklin Cudjoe, Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of IMANI, included Kay Codjoe , Writer and Associate, and John Sitsofe Mensah , Digital Transformation Specialist and Associate.
The delegation was received by Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu and his Deputy, Dr. Clement Abas Apaak.
The Minister’s central concern was clear. Ghana’s education debate has become too concentrated on the upper levels of the system while the foundation remains under severe pressure.
He pointed first to the country’s basic school infrastructure deficit, arguing that the physical conditions under which children learn must receive the same urgency that governments have attached to access and feeding.
The data make that concern difficult to dismiss. The 2025 Auditor General reported that 10,730 public basic schools across 13 regions had no classroom blocks, affecting 3,050,808 pupils.
In those schools, teaching and learning were taking place under trees, in sheds, churches and other temporary structures. Section 36 of the Pre Tertiary Education Act places responsibility on the Ghana Education Service to construct, equip and maintain public basic and senior high schools.
The Minister’s point was not that feeding programmes or Free Senior High School are unimportant.
His argument was about balance. When Free SHS was introduced, substantial political attention and public resources naturally moved toward secondary education.
But the unintended consequence, in his view, was that basic education did not receive the sustained attention required to address its infrastructure and quality deficits.
Feeding a child matters, but so does providing that child with a proper classroom, safe sanitation, a teacher and an environment in which learning can actually take place.
That concern goes to the heart of Ghana’s constitutional commitment to Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education.
The Minister questioned whether the country has sufficiently completed that obligation before allowing the national conversation to be dominated by Free SHS. Basic education, he stressed, is the foundation.
If literacy, numeracy and learning conditions are weak at kindergarten, primary and junior high school levels, those weaknesses do not disappear when a child reaches secondary school. They move upward with the student.
There is also a financing question. UNICEF’s 2025 Education Budget Brief projected basic education at 24.1 percent of the Ministry of Education budget, while warning that insufficient investment in foundational learning could weaken outcomes at higher levels and deepen inequality.
The lesson is not that secondary education should lose funding.
It is that Ghana cannot sustainably expand the top of the system while underinvesting in the bottom.
Teacher supply and deployment formed the second major part of the discussion.
The Minister said the problem is not simply how many teachers Ghana employs, but whether teachers are deployed according to need. National ratios can suggest adequate staffing while individual schools, districts and regions remain short of teachers in critical subjects.
World Bank reporting shows that at least 19,987 trained teachers were recruited and deployed in 2022 and 2023, with 11,110 placed in GALOP basic schools. Yet deployment remains central to whether recruitment actually reaches underserved classrooms.
Teacher policy should therefore be driven by school level data showing where shortages exist, which subjects are affected and what incentives are needed to retain teachers in underserved communities. Recruitment without rational deployment can increase the wage bill without solving the classroom problem.
Sanitation was another concern raised by the Minister.
The state of toilets, water systems and hygiene facilities directly affects attendance, health, dignity and learning.
A serious national school infrastructure programme must therefore include more than classroom blocks. Water, sanitation, electricity, furniture and accessibility are also essential.
The Minister also spoke firmly about discipline. He rejected the tendency to place responsibility solely on students or solely on teachers. Discipline, he argued, is a shared institutional and social responsibility.
Students must be held to standards, but teachers and school authorities must also demonstrate professionalism and accountability.
Parents, chiefs, religious leaders and opinion leaders should be brought into the conversation.
Ghana cannot repair discipline in schools if every stakeholder defines the problem as somebody else’s responsibility.
Scholarship administration also featured prominently. With the former Scholarships Secretariat replaced by the Ghana Scholarships Authority under Act 1149, the Minister argued for greater harmonisation of publicly funded scholarship schemes.
The objective should be a coherent national system in which awards are properly managed, prioritised, monitored and accounted for.
The law provides for considerations including merit, financial need, disability, fields of study and the developmental needs of the country.
Greater coordination could reduce duplication, improve prioritisation and strengthen public confidence in the allocation of scholarships.
The Minister also urged stronger attention to special and inclusive education. He suggested that GETFund should dedicate a meaningful share of its resources to special needs education and training.
Ghana’s 2026 education budget allocates GH¢52.85 million to Inclusive and Special Education, but the wider needs remain substantial.
Specialist teachers, accessible infrastructure and assistive technologies require sustained financing.
Finally, the meeting considered the role of domestic bursars and matrons within the education system.
The Minister said their responsibilities, commitments and institutional support should be reviewed to ensure that they are properly equipped to meet the standards and expectations of the Ministry.
Their work touches food safety, catering, sanitation, stock management and student welfare, making them part of the education quality system.
The significance of the IMANI meeting was in connecting problems Ghana already knows. Infrastructure affects learning. Teacher deployment affects equality. Sanitation affects attendance.
Discipline affects school culture. Scholarships affect opportunity. Special education tests inclusion.
Every weakness at the basic level eventually appears higher up the system.
The policy direction should now be equally connected. Ghana needs an education strategy that strengthens the foundation while protecting the gains made in secondary access.
That requires measurable infrastructure targets, transparent financing, school level teacher deployment data, stronger sanitation standards, disciplined institutions, accountable scholarships and sustained funding for learners with special needs.
The meeting ultimately placed a fundamental question before the country. Ghana’s next phase of education reform cannot be judged only by how many students enter senior high school or how much government spends keeping them there.
It must also be judged by the quality of the basic education that prepared them to arrive.
If the foundation remains weak, every success recorded above it will eventually inherit the weakness below.
