Sustaining the free secondary School Policy of Ghana

In recent times, teething challenges in Ghana’s free secondary education policy including congestion in classrooms, inadequate dormitories, and delays in disbursement of feeding grants have engaged the attention of many Ghanaians. Some individuals in the opposition, NDC have even postulated about the possible extermination of the programme within the next five years. The frank discussion is, however, particularly interesting to me because as we say “a government is like a waiter in a noisy restaurant, you must necessarily speak up before you can catch her attention”. And so, discussion on any government policy is a good one and potentially could force a change to various parts of the policy. It becomes uninteresting when we reduce everything to comic as Hassan Ayariga of the APC as usual took the discussion to the playhouse and exorcised the somewhat lively debate. Until the timely intervention by Dr Raymond Atuguba, I had switched my faculty antenna from the discussion. Dr Atuguba as reported by peacefmonline.com is calling for the legislation of the Free Secondary School Policy. He made the comments at a constitutional review conference at Dodowa. He specifically said the following “We need a long-term development plan that is binding on all governments, binding at a certain level of governance that for example every government will say implement free SHS”. I support the position well-articulated by Dr Atuguba 100%. The first step to entrenching the policy must find meaning in the laws of Ghana. Free secondary education policy must not become like other educational policies that got reversed immediately a new government came to power. Dr, I support your call. Now let me address some the other issues flying all over including the “prophecy” that the policy will die within the next five years. Well, If the policy is legislated, I am sure the discussion will not be same. In any case, government is about choices and the sovereign state desirous of sustaining any policy will and can do so rather easily. The government only have to prioritise education and provide the needed resources. The Nana Addo government for sure would ensure Free SHS policy is sustained. That, I am very confident about. Perhaps, the discussion must shift a bit to the quality of the policy rather than its sustainability because the government has all the instruments at its disposal to ensure the policy stays. The funding of the policy has as yet not settled, and I guess the fear of the imminent collapse of the policy is fed on by the constraints with funding. Well, funding for any great and massive policy as Free SHS would not come easy. It requires thinking through and settling on funding option that is guaranteed of reasonably consistent flows. Below I discuss the many options that are at the disposal of government to fund the programme. The first is budgeted funding. The government can increase the educational vault by cutting back on other expenses. It looks to me that is exactly what the 2018 budget provided. The government has allocated more resources to the sector to cover the additional costs brought about by the policy. The problem with this policy, however, is that other equally important sectors of the economy suffer as resources allocation to them dwindles. For instance, an important sector as sport saw a drastic reduction in its FY2018 budget. As they say, the budget is about choices, and so the choice is education. Better luck to Sports sector, next time! The second option is the education bond concept. Many governments weigh the cost of education annually and issue bonds to raise the equivalent funds required. This is a debt instrument. Just as we are doing for the energy sector with the energy sector bonds, same can be done for the education sector. The rationale for this notion is that education creates positive externalities for current and future generations and if financing of such course would even create debt tomorrow, the benefits are still higher than the cost to future generations. There is merit in this argument. Government borrow today, pay for the cost of education of the next generation, they grow and pay the debt themselves. Sounds good but ethically, when you bring forth a child, you wish you instead leave them wealth than to leave them a debt. Debt instruments are like burdening future generation with today's problems plus their own (unknown) problems. We must instead leave the next generation goodies of today than to entangle them with debt. The third option is the concept of scholarship scheme. Under this scheme, the government creates a scholarship system where funding from the government itself, private cooperation and individuals are pulled together to finance education. For instance, in Ghana, the government already runs the Northern Education Trust Fund, CocoBod runs the CocoBod scholarship scheme and many more, not to talk of many scholarships from religious bodies. Under the scholarship scheme, the government would pull all these fragmented schemes together and centrally administer it. The problem with this scheme is that funding inadequacy is a common feature here. The numbers under a national free education are higher and more significant than individual scholarships. The components under national free education are many and broader than a mere scholarship system. Often, national scholarship scheme supports other schemes to guarantee funding adequacy for education. The next is the so-called voluntary education scheme. VES is complementary and not the primary source of funding for education. They are optional, and one is not sure how much can be mobilised at each point in time. You cannot rely on voluntary funding to fund a free SHS policy. It instead complements a bigger funding scheme. The last scheme is what my team and I have been working on for some time now called the “Flexible Beneficiary Pays (FBP) Scheme”. Throughout the funding discussion, one concern has been why wealthy families have to enjoy free education. Some parents even openly indicated their willingness to pay, if offered the opportunity. Many called for a targeted financing scheme- where the rich pays and the poor do not. Under the FBP, the idea is to have a national funding scheme that will receive a contribution from income earning citizens over a specified duration. Those with high willingness to pay pays more but the contribution from each happens within a specified period after which you exit. Our initial analysis of FBP protocols shows that Ghana’s Free SHS can be done off the balance sheet of government. The FBP would, however, require legislation and it fit much into Dr Atugubu’s suggestion of legislating the policy. If the Ministry of Education is interested in FBP plan, we are ready to engage and assist in making Free SHS policy a workable one.