The government has announced plans to begin distributing free tablets to Senior High School (SHS) students on Monday, March 25, 2024.
According to the Executive Director of the Centre for National Distance Learning and Open Schooling, Nana Gyamfi Adwabour, this is part of the Ghana Smart Schools Project.
The project, he said, is to provide teaching and learning management systems, digital learning content and electronic devices to all senior high and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) schools nationwide.
Speaking on JoyNews on March 22, he said all 503 public SHS and TVET institutions would benefit from the project.
He clarified that the distribution would occur in phases, with each phase covering 30 schools until all schools are beneficiaries. He mentioned that this process would take more than a year to complete.
“The project of this sort is a national project and implementation has to be done very right. So, if you look at it a lot of stakeholder engagement has been done and it’s a collaborative project, so the private sector, public industry, academia we all have to come together, GES which they own the SHS, TVET, they are all part of it.
“So they came about with this schedule with the minister sitting on top, that these 30 schools have to go and ministry, we have a plan on how to implement the project so we can keep an eye on monitoring and evaluation to make sure that we achieve the results that we are looking for,” he said
He clarified that all Senior High School and TVET students, including those in Form 1, Form 2, and Form 3, would be included.
Meanwhile, Mr Adwabour noted that the tablets were already in the country, and it was left to distribute them to GES and TVET stores in various districts, where they would carry on the distribution.
The tablets, he said, has a four-inch screen, four gigabytes of RAM, and a battery that lasts for seven to eight hours, along with a solar-based battery pack. The tablets are water-resistant and have a quad-core 2 processor.
The Executive Director added that it will supplement textbooks and prepare students to use digital tools.
“We are blessed that our President sees education as a public good. Our President sees education as a human right Article 25 1(C) talks about that. that he wants every child to receive education irrespective of your location or your disability.
“We want to ensure them that this transition would deepen their education. Bring more access, more quality, and especially relevance to our education. So we can compete globally and be globally competitive with our other neighbours, especially in Africa and Europe in other places,” he added.