Vice President of Ghana, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has touted Ghana’s immense achievement in bridging the gender inequality gap through education.
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has told a high-level Africa Caribean summit in Barbados how the Akufo-Addo government has been implementing policies to address the issues of gender inequality in Ghana.
Addressing the Summit during the interaction section at the Africa Caribean Summit, the Vice President enlightened the audience about how Ghana is achieving its goals through education.
The Vice president in answering a question on how African governments are dealing with geneder inequality, Dr Bawumia took his audience through a number of policies and interventions being implemented by the government.
Speaking now how government is using education to solve the gender equality question, the vice president said.
“Historically the issue has been exclusion, and if you are going to get the type of development that is required, you definitely need inclusion and therefore you need to create gender equality.”
“The vehicles we are using in Ghana for example, in creating gender equality is in the area of education. One of the things that we saw was the high levels of drop outs in females when you get to the secondary level.
“And usually when you get to the cost of secondary education, many parents are unwilling or unable to bear the cost of that education and usually the females tended to suffer in the choice matrix of which of your children should go to school,” he said.
“So, when we came into office in 2017, we instituted a policy of free senior secondary education for all. We have done that since 2017 and it has just been remarkable. You’ve had hundreds of thousands of children who otherwise would not have had senior high school education now enrolled.”
“What is now important in this context is that now you have more girl enrollees than boys. So, whereas you had inequality or gender inequality in the school mix before, we now have virtual parity between boys and girls in secondary school enrollment and that is more important in trying to create more gender parity in the society,”Bawumia Added.
Touting the achievement of Education and young girls in Ghana, the Vice President was proud to reveal some of the achievement girls in senior High schools.
“Recently one of our girls’ schools won a world robotic competition, beating countries like Germany, South Korea, the United States and we think that part of this is just the opportunity to learn because some of those girls, without the free senior high school opportunity, would not have had all of that.
source: theGhanaianvoice.com
