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Peter Nortsu Kotoe, the Member of Parliament for Akatsi North is demanding the source of funding for the government’s promise to give each senior high school student in the country an electronic tablet.
Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has disclosed that the government will provide SHS students with free tablets.
He announced this at the start of the 2023 New Year School at the University of Ghana, Legon.
“This year, we are on course to provide all Senior High School students in Ghana with tablets which are loaded with textbooks on them for their studies,” Dr. Bawumia announced.
“That’s a very game-changing development. We will have past questions preloaded on these tablets that will be distributed,” he stated.
To further broaden the digitalization agenda, some schools across the country in 2020 received free Wifi connections sponsored by the government, he stated.
Peter Nortsu Kotoe who is a member of Parliament’s Education Committee is skeptical about the government’s plans to distribute free electronic tablets to all SHS students.
He acknowledged that though there is a need to technologically develop education in the country, the time to do so was a misplaced priority, especially with the distribution of electronic tablets.
“There is a need to develop our education technologically, but we need to take one step at a time. The Vice President has a good idea, but the timing is wrong,” he said.
He wondered where the government will get funds to execute the free electronic policy because provisions for the initiative were not captured in the 2023 budget.
“There is no provision in the 2023 budget for the procurement of tablets for senior high schools and I know they are going to push that one to GETFund but GETFund is so much overburdened that it cannot meet all the demands required of it because GETFund received only 39 percent of the approved allocation in 2022, and it is going to be worse this year,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Executive Director of the Institute of Education Studies (IFEST), Dr. Peter Partey-Anti, has lauded Dr. Bawumia for the policy to provide SHS students with tablets.
He said most of the first-class private schools have this policy already in place and it is clear from many homes that most kids now log onto the smartphones of parents and guardians to learn.
