Bomaase Siblinor; where children start school only at age 9

In most of Ghana’s urban areas children are sent to school at an early age. This means that by the time they are five or six they are already in Class One.

Well, the situation seems to be very different in many rural areas like in the Upper Manya district of the Eastern region.

In this village, children until recently could not attend school until they had turned nine and had enough strength to walk for two hours to the nearest school, a situation residents there say was worrying.

The road to the district is very bad with several huge holes best described as manholes. But this is the only means to Bomaase Siblinor, Osonson Korlenya, Brempon and other villages in the Upper Manya district.

Residents in these villages are predominantly poor peasant farmers. Not only are they worried that there is no electricity, hospital and potable water in the village, but the village has for years had no school.

“The children are very young so sometimes it takes them more than 2 hours to reach school. Sometimes when they get exhausted, they take a nap under trees before they continue their journey. That is why they normally start school at age 9,” an opinion leader told Joy News.

But thanks to the EbbyMay Foundation, a non-profit organisation, the village can now boast of an interim school building made from bamboo sticks and mud.

There are no trained teachers here but the leader of the EbbyMay foundation, Mary Agbettor tells Joy News that is her small contribution to helping the less privileged in the society.

But the residents of Bomaase Siblinor want government to expedite work on fulfilling the promise it made to them by building a new classroom block for the village.

“We want the government to build the school it promised for us.  It seems we are lagging behind in terms of development and we want our children to be educated so they can grow to become responsible children in the country. The land earmarked for the project has been cleared. We want government to start building the school for us.”

The residents were interacting with host of the Cosmopolitan Mix on JOY FM, Doreen Andoh who donated some books, teaching and learning materials to the school on Monday.

Meanwhile, the Starfish group of Ashesi University also volunteered to teach and mentor the kids in these villages as a means of contributing their quota to educating the rural child.

The school’s library