Ghana makes significant strides in education (edu) Dec/28/07

THE first phase of the National Fibre Backbone Network has been completed.
The network which covers Accra through the southern part of the country to Tamale and ends at Ho will provide affordable bandwidth cost to service providers as well as increase the quality of service they render.
This was made known by a deputy Director at the Ministry of Communications, Mr Desmond Boateng, when he deputised for the Minister of Communications, Dr Aggrey Ntim, at the 5th Awards and certification ceremony of the Global Teenager Project (GTP) in Accra.
The project, launched in 1999, is aimed at empowering young people to have access to information and communications technology education.
He also announced the ministry’s facilitation of Community Information Centres (CICs) aimed at affording communities, especially the youth, to participate in the ICT era.
He said the government being well aware that education was the bedrock of human development, continued to demonstrate its commitment to address the challenges of the social and economic pressures of the youthful population, saying “a youthful population is an asset to any nation provided their potential are harnessed and directed”.
Mr Boateng said the government also recognised that an educated youth would facilitate the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and addressed the socio-economic development of the country.
To this end, he said the deployment and application of ICTs had been fully incorporated into the new educational reform agenda to generate a highly skilled youth that could help accelerate socio-economic growth.
A Director at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, Ms Hilda Hagan, who read a speech on behalf of the sector minister, Prof. Dominic Fobih, said Ghana had made significant strides in its education system as a result of various reforms, policies and laws, saying that the reforms had also placed emphasis on vocational, technical and agricultural education with more emphasis on ICT.
He said “ICT without doubt has become crucial for the survival of the global world. Indeed, the ICT revolution is having a tremendous impact on the rapid development of world economies and making national economies more interdependent than they were some years back”.
This, he said, was a result of the fact that growth was induced by the flow of information and this realisation, he added, had led most economies into knowledge based ones.
“This realisation has also dawned on developing countries and which are rigorously pursuing the use of ICT as a platform for socio-economic development” he said.
The Director General of the Ghana-Kofi Annan ICT Centre, Ms Dorothy Gordon, who chaired the ceremony called on the students and their teachers to endeavour to learn and acquire new and more cost effective technologies in their studies.
The project Manager of GTP, Mr Ebenezer Malcolm, in a welcome address said the project would from 2008 train more students and teachers in ICT to promote sound ICT education in the country.
Awards and certificates were presented to some students and teachers who excelled in the work of the project.