Improving Quality of and Access to Basic Education
The goal of the US Government Basic Education program is to ensure that at the end of primary school, children read with understanding and transition to junior high school. USAID activities include improving the quality of literacy instruction, supporting marginalized populations such as girls in school, strengthening management capacity, and building community capacity to contribute to student and teacher performance.
An emphasis on using country systems will enable USAID to bring an increasing number of interventions to national scale. Opportunities exist to support decentralization, the most effective way to identify and address local educational challenges and to promote accountability; to improve public sector and civil service management in order to effectively use limited resources to produce expected results; and to leverage the private sector to reach educational goals.
Activities include:
Increasing access to and completion of basic education: USAID supports a community teachers program that recruits, trains, and supports volunteers to teach in short-staffed rural schools. In FY2010, USAID contributed to overall increases in Ghana's national primary school completion rates from 83 percent to 88 percent. USAID also provided scholarships to support the education of 4,000 girls, a five-fold increase.
Improving the quality of education: With USAID funding, Ghana Education Service has implemented a new national program over a three-year period. The program enables children to read better and quicker by transitioning from their mother tongue to English. USAID also creates a better learning environment through teacher training and pupil assessment.
Improving management and accountability of schools: A new USAID funded activity is a national report card program where districts and schools collect and share performance data with the entire community. USAID also supports efforts to increase the involvement and ability of parents and other community members to lobby local representatives to make their schools better places for their children to learn.
Increasing educational governance: Many districts in Ghana have proven to be good managers, yet their schools perform poorly. USAID is providing these districts with financial and specialized technical support so they become better educational managers, improving the quality of their schools and promoting accountability for results.