The 2023 Global Action Week (GAW) of Education, one of the major annual activities of the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition(GNECC) which celebrates education, has been launched.
As in the past, GNECC is leading the celebration of GAW 2023 in Ghana from 19-24 April 2023, under the global theme “Decolonizing Education Financing”.
GNECC has continued to spearhead the annual GAWE as one of its main activities since 2003 and has made important progress.
However, more needs to be done to realise the right to inclusive and quality pre-tertiary education for ALL towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 targets.
In spite of increased access to education globally, education still remains an inaccessible right for millions of children around the world due to poverty, marginalization, and financial deficit.
More than 72 million children of primary education age are not in school and 759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness necessary to improve both their living conditions and those of their children.
In -Sub-Saharan Africa, the most affected area has over 32 million children of primary school going age, remaining uneducated (https://www.humanium.org/en/right-to-education).
Also, Statistics from the 2021 Population and Housing Census (PHC) revealed that 1,215,546 children of school-going age (4 to 17 years) in Ghana are not attending school.
Out of that number, almost one million (942,427) children have never attended school.
The Savannah Region has 43.2 percent of children who have never attended a school which is the highest percentage in the country.
The Government of Ghana’s 12.9% budgetary allocation to the education sector in the 2023 national budget indicates an increase as compared to the 2022 allocation.
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However, this falls below the target Ghana has set for itself in 2021 during the Global Education Summit held in the United Kingdom where the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo, who is also the GPE champion for domestic financing for education, pledged to spend at least 23% of the national budget on education over the medium term from 2021 to 2025.
The proposed national theme for the 2023 GAWE celebration in Ghana is dubbed: “Domestic Funding: Key to Sustainable Basic Education”.
The theme is rooted in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 agenda: “Ensuring inclusive equitable quality education and life-long learning opportunities for all.”
The coalition is of the view that just as a vehicle can hardly reach its destination without sufficient fuel so will the country not be able to achieve the above-mentioned goal without sound and sustainable domestic funding.