Recommendation for Further Research

Social science research is a cyclical process that every social scientist is incumbent to contribute to it. In this regard and based on the findings of this study, I make the following recommendations for further research.

To begin with, the Southern part of Ghana should have also been covered so as to get its side of the story which would have gone a long way to enrich the analysis. It would have been good to observe what is happening in the boarding Senior High

Schools in the South in order to be able to do a comparison between parents paying their wards school fees in the South and a Government affirmative action in the North. I therefore recommend that, future research on educational inequality should take into consideration studying both the North and the South in order to be able to get a comprehensive view of such inequalities in Ghana.

Also, the colonial relationship with the South has to be delved into for us to get a full and complete story about the role of colonialism in the development of education in Ghana. It will be good to find out how the Southern part of the country received education at the beginning as compared to the North that doubtfully reacted to the introduction of education. I therefore recommend a comparative study in that regard.

7 Epilogue

The policy that sought to bring about educational inclusion which is now creating new forms of exclusion in the North is not necessarily a result of the lapses that are found in the educational system in Ghana alone, but also the socio-economic and political arrangement in the country. Therefore, in other to get the desired results, there is the need for a comprehensive and holistic policy orientation which has the strategy of dealing with the structural challenges of the Ghanaian society such as poverty and other social inequalities.

The thesis has shown that the affirmative action is being implemented as if the Northern part of Ghana is being done a favour by the Government. This however will not lead to a long lasting solution to the problem at hand. There is therefore the need for Ghana to adapt the rights-based policy approach whereby the inclusionary policy-directions in education will be as a result of the fundamental rights of the excluded but not just the provision of incentives. This calls for an approach to policy making and implementation that seeks to address the rights of the marginalised who also have human dignity like the rest of the citizenry but not just an incentivised policy regime.

Thus, the interventions should not take a charity-dimension by considering the people as mere beneficiaries but recognise that people

have rights and duly so. This line of argument has been captured by Yusuf Sayed in his article titled: overcoming exclusion in education:

In developing policies which are responsive to the needs of minorities and indigenous peoples, there is a need to move away from one-size-fits-all policies and instead develop those which recognize that individuals’ social positions. A failure to understand the specificity of the problems can create perverse unintended outcomes [….] it is important to develop context- specific policies that are tailored to specific needs while ensuring that differentiation does not drift into new forms of segregation.

(Sayed 2009: 34).

On this note, it is recommended that governments (especially those in Africa) should move away from general-purpose policies and move towards need-based specific policies. This is more so because many policies sometimes suffer because of lack of/poor funding. It is therefore imperative for policy makers to think of how the neediest in society can benefit from policies that are meant to alleviate poverty. I therefore recommend targeting where the needy in society are identified and made beneficiaries other than having a blanket policy as some people may not need it by virtue of their economic standing.

In Ghana, some people, especially those from the South hold the view that the Northerners enjoyed free education for long from the dawn of independence.

However, the Northerners themselves argue that it is not quite true because the so called free education covers only boarding fees which is just one component of the cost of education. They pointed out that there were some parents who could not afford to send their children to Senior High School because of the other cost components such as school uniforms, text books and other ancillary cost that comes with keeping children in school. As one cannot deny the fact that there are poor people in every part of Ghana, it has kept Governments thinking of extending the policy for all Senior High Schools in the country.

As a result, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Government of Ghana led by Nana Akufo-Addo has just introduced the Free Senior High School policy (FSHS) for the whole country which will face out the Northern Scholarship Scheme by 2020. This policy is meant to be enjoyed by the whole country as the NSS was being enjoyed by only the people of northern extraction. However, the focus of this thesis is the Northern Scholarship Scheme and how it is bridging the gap between the North and the South. Even though it is too early to appraise this new FSHS policy, it is recommended that, this new intervention should be evaluated after it has run for some time to find out whether northern Ghana is better or worse off under its implementation with regard to closing the gap between the North and the South.