According to the School for Life Strategic (SFL) Plan 2013-2018, over 150,000 children have benefited directly from its access to education policy. Together with DANIDA support, SFL has reached communities in 17 districts, mainly in Ghana’s Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions.
In addition, children are benefiting under the Afram Plains initiative in the Eastern Region, and through education quality improvements for a large number of children in formal schools.
SFL also spelt out it role in ensuring Millennium Development Goal 2 – ensuring that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary school – is achieved. To this end, it has taken a lead role in organizing NGOs and civil society actions in the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) Alliance to hold government accountable to ensure MDG 2 is achieved.
Furthermore, SFL’s situational and problem analysis feature, notes that 330,000 out-of-school children are found in the three regions in the north (Northern, Upper West and Upper East). The report also noted high numbers of out-of-school children in the Western Region (104,763), Central Region (98,176) and Volta Region (96,002).
The report included an observation on the connection between poverty rates and proportion of out of school children:
“Root causes for children being out of school are closely linked to Ghana’s development bottlenecks which include intergenerational poverty, educational poverty and the social dynamics of structural inequality.”
Additionally, SFL also observed that poverty levels are one of the key determinants as to whether children are enrolled or retained in school.
Consequently, the most deprived districts have a higher proportion of children out of school and lower attendance rates in comparison with the better endowed districts in Ghana.
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