Inequality of Education in Ghana: The Irony of being “inside or outside’’

Chapter five which is linked to chapter four provided answers to the questions of, what is the current state of the Northern Scholarship Scheme compared to its original package? What are the challenges confronting the effective implementation of the Northern Scholarship Scheme? and What is the effect of the Northern Scholarship Scheme in contributing to bridging the educational gap between the North and the South of Ghana. At the time the colonialists were packing bag and baggage to leave the shores of Ghana, they implicitly agreed that their developmental policy disfavoured the Northern part of the country (Gbadamoshi 2016). As a result, they were ready to find a way of “compensating’’ the North which

they advocated for an educational policy together with the first president of the republic of Ghana. Whilst acknowledging the fact that this policy has had a modicum of benefits to the people of the North, findings of this thesis suggest that, implementation challenges were the bane of it contribution of closing the gap between the North and the South.

In Ghana, it is the duty of Government to feed and accommodate boarding students in the Senior High Schools (SHS) who are of northern extraction as part of the policy package. However, many often, the government reneges on its duty of paying for these expenses on time thereby putting the schools in a dire situation.

When this happened, the students were poorly fed because the school authorities could not find money to feed them well. This created a serious problem because the children needed to be well-nourished for both their physical and mental development as most of them would have been in the stage of adolescence. For them to grasp what was being taught and to get a full concentration when in class, they needed to be well fed. Tied to this, the Southern students stood the chance of performing better in the final exam than their northern colleagues because they mostly run smooth academic sessions as compared to the erratic school seasons the North sometimes goes through. This final exam is taken all over the country and used as a sieving mechanism to qualify students into tertiary institutions.

Although the policy was intended to reduce educational inequalities between the two sides, it is argued that the situation of late disbursement of funds created a

“new set” of inequalities that should be brought to our attention.

The development of infrastructure in education is a necessary condition to the betterment of education in every country. Northern Ghana which is comparatively rural, is challenged with educational infrastructural deficit. Some schools in the North lack classrooms, dormitories, Information Communication Technology (ICT) laboratories and proper science laboratories. This kind of imbalance in infrastructural development hampers students from the Northern part of the country from performing favourably with their southern counterparts. It has been pointed out in this thesis that, since the annexation of the Northern Territories by

the colonialists, it is yet to get its deserving share of educational infrastructure in order to leapfrog it into a better living condition. It is therefore imperative for Government to double its efforts in order to achieve the aim of closing the gap between the two sides

When a policy is being implemented, it is appropriate for an evaluation to be done to ascertain as to how effective that policy has been. However, there has not been such an evaluation but some of the components of the policy have been scrapped.

The question to ask is what informed the cancellation of those parts of the policy?

I pointed out that this defies the dictates of best practice and called for evidence-based policy formulation and implementation in Ghana. It is difficult to stop the policy all together because of political reasons. There is no politician who can win elections with either only the North or the South. For that matter Governments are careful not to lose votes from the North for rightly truncating the policy. Thus, the programme has lost its initial focus thereby not achieving its original aim. I argue here that, this has put the North in the position of being “included’’ but not benefiting from their “inclusiveness’’ fully.

In some countries, one may be able to tell which part of the country somebody comes from by the name of the person. “Names go with identities and identities go with names. They are closely related and form a pair of concepts. What is meant is this: names are symbols of identities. They tell, or at least may tell, something about the bearer of the name’’ (Brendler 2012: 29). Because of this identity-telling concept of names, some northerners faced exclusion because they adapted southern names. The policy implementers largely identify beneficiaries by names which sometimes created boundaries that excluded some northerners from enjoying the policy. I argue in line with Bond (2006: 611) that the three sufficient indicators of national identity should be, “residence, ancestry and birth’’

(sometimes we could add naturalisation to these three). It is therefore exclusionary to strip somebody off his/her “belongingness’’ because of a name.

At the time the policy was being formulated, the framers would not have thought that a day will come when students from the South of Ghana who are in northern

schools will be treated unjustly. This study has shown that students of southern descent suffer all the ills of the Northern Scholarship Scheme when they should not.

Such students make a difference because they pay full fees for their sustenance in school. How can they also lose academic contact hours (like their northern colleagues) any time northern schools are being closed down for lack of feeding grants when they have paid their fees? I countered the argument that such students are of negligible numbers and pointed out that this is social injustice. Even if it were only one, such student’s rights should be upheld. As Martin Luthur King Junior puts it: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’’ (cited in Rieder 2013: 16).

Considering all the challenges that hamper the smooth implementation of the Northern Scholarship Scheme coupled with the high poverty levels of the North, the findings suggest in this study that the policy is not significantly contributing to close the gap between the two divides. This is making the educational inequality that existed between the North and the South durable “those that last from one social interaction to the next, with special attention to those that persist over whole careers, lifetimes, and organizational histories’’ (Tilly 1999: 6). Poverty and educational inequality are “a chicken and egg situation’’ where each one of them can cause the other. Whereas the government is trying to solve the problem of regional educational inequality, the spatial dimension of poverty in Ghana is weighing down its success thereby making such inequality persistent. This makes one ponder as to whether the question asked by Bowen and his colleagues has ever been answered:

Are the claims of equity really being met today by a policy that gives no positive weight to having come from a poor family- and having somehow overcome all of the attendant barriers in order to compete with a candidate from a very different background for a place? (Bowen et al. 2005: 255).

This assertion is further supported by Miriama Awumbila18 in the global forum for development 2016, where she pointed out how the gap between the North and the

18Miriama Awumbila, Professor of Geography and member of Board of Directors of SADA

South is still wide notwithstanding a couple of interventions that were introduced to bridge it. She claimed that:

The successive governments attempted to address the regional disparities, with free education, for example. But no policy has had the desired effects. The Northern regions, which are currently populated by 30% of the 26 million Ghanaians, have remained underdeveloped. They are lagging at all levels: poverty, health, education, sanitation, unemployment, etc. (Awumbila 2017)

This explains why the regional educational inequality in Ghana is stubborn to deal with. Inasmuch as governments have tried to use policy to reduce this inequality to the barest minimum, policy implementation challenges make things difficult.

6.4 Conceptual, Theoretical and Methodological Implications of the Thesis