VSO’s TENI Project Making Impact In Beneficiary Districts

The quality of educational standards in Northern Ghana has for some time now become a great source of concern to all stakeholders in the educational sector particularly parents and the Ghana Education Service (GES).

Students’ performances at the annual Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) organized by the West African Examination Council have been very abysmal in recent years. Between 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly in the Northern Region in particular, secured 60^th, 69^th, 88^th, 91^st, 89^th, 98^th and 103^rd positions respectively, out of the 134 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) nationwide whose students also wrote the BECE throughout those years. 

Measures might have been put in place by the government and officials of the GES to address the challenges that were confronting quality education delivery in Northern Ghana, but some stakeholders still thought that such measures perhaps were not aggressive enough or effective to deal with those challenges. One of such stakeholders is Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), an international organization operating in Northern Ghana and seeking to improve lives and livelihoods of women, girls and children, including those with disabilities through education, governance and capacity building.

For instance, in 2009 VSO launched a five-year aggressive education programme dubbed ‘Tackling Education Needs Inclusively (TENI)’ that sought to achieve systemic change in education by improving retention, transition, completion and quality of basic education for disadvantaged children, particularly girls in the three regions of the North – Upper West, Upper East and Northern. 

The launch of TENI followed a study conducted by VSO in some selected districts which results pointed to the fact that enrolling and retaining children in school and ensuring that they received quality tuition that would lead to their successful completion were hampering the overall objective of free compulsory universal basic education in Ghana.  

Speaking at a three-day conference of girls’ clubs organized by VSO in Tamale, Eric Duorinaah, TENI Project Coordinator, said the project which was in its fourth year of implementation, had so far reached out to about 48,000 children mostly very poor girls and children with disability from three districts including West Mamprusi in the Northern Region, Talensi-Nabdam in the Upper East Region and Jirapa in the Upper West Region. 

Beyond the direct benefits that the 48,000 children derived under the project, he said TENI was also complementing the effort of government in the area of teacher capacity through in-service training to about 2,000 teachers; building the capacity of education managers (so far 39 District Education Officers) and head-teachers (217) as well as assessing the performance of pupils across all the communities that the project covered.

Thus, as part of the project implementation in the whole of 2012, VSO built the capacity of girls’ clubs it formed in the beneficiary schools as a step to increase sharing and promotion of best practices on education. It also promoted inter-school and inter-district girl club interactions in selected primary and Junior High Schools through learning visits and competitions by working closely with the Girls Education Unit of the GES.

According to Mr. Duorinaah, the number of children currently participating in gender clubs continues to increase since 2009 as the quality of support sessions that helped pupils to stay in school had also been improved. 

Club participation had increased from 2,800 members in the last two years to about 8,023 members, he stated, adding that in the West Mamprusi District, for instance, the number of functioning clubs had risen significantly from 10 initially to 110.  

The TENI Project Coordinator disclosed that monitoring in all three districts revealed that most of the clubs had been engaged in dynamic and interactive activities to address major topics such as the importance of girls’ education, avoiding pre-marital sex, HIV/AIDS, practicing personal hygiene and how to participate effectively in classroom learning. 

A representative of the Northern Regional Director of the GES who opened the conference, Alhaji Iddrisu Abdulai, observed that four years into the implementation of TENI, the results had been overwhelming in the quest for quality education delivery. 

This, according to him, was against the backdrop that Northern Ghana remained the poorest part of the country with majority of families striving to earn basic food and also to educate their children.

Alhaji Abdulai called on parents and guardians to desist from defining roles for girls and boys in the family as that tend to stereotype them against their proper development at home and in school. “Just as girls can cook, wash bowls and sweep, boys too can perform such roles and these should be encouraged by parents and guardians”, he maintained. 

Meanwhile, the conference of girls’ clubs was organized by VSO, the Net Organisation for Youth Empowerment and Development (NOYED-Ghana) and Partners as a demonstration of VSO’s commitment to share the little gains it was making at the community level. Under the theme: “Promoting girls’ retention in school through sharing of best practices”, the conference brought together participants from all districts that TENI operated in the three regions. It aimed at building the confidence and the capacity of the girl-child to be able to speak in public and ultimately to groom them to be responsible future leaders.