Rural Education Project in Ghana Seeking Start-up Investment

A rural education project in Ghana, seeks start-up investment, in order to better the basic education of the children in Africa.

The project is aimed at recruiting all distance education graduates with diploma in education and in educational psychology, to feed our rural communities basic schools, to free all SHS students teaching there, to further their education and also to give rest to our retired teachers still teaching. This will enhance adequate and relevant teaching and learning processes.

What is our project about?

We wish to give new hope to rural schools of providing them with trained teachers. In the labor history of Ghana, especially education sector is always challenged of getting professionals for the job in the remote rural areas. This is what makes the teaching and learning activities inadequate and irrelevant to inaccurate in these areas. We can realize this particular factor has been a serious burden on the life of all our previous government and remain the same till these days. Should we just cross our hands and see this situation unchanged in the life of the pupils of these areas, as living or be born in a rural area is a curse?

Alliance Enfants du Monde says no as it toils to launch this unique and adequate solution for this eternal problem in the life of mother Ghana. In this arena of distance education there is no need for our pupils to suffer the provision of professional teachers anymore. Through a thorough survey conducted by us, it is clear all our teaching universities (University of Cape Coast and University of Education, Winneba) produce more than thousand (1000) teaching professionals across the country every year. These well trained teachers are struggling since their graduation to better their living condition by joining the public sector in vain.

What are the targets of our project?

Through our initiative, we are zealous of:

• Saving the education in the rural areas across the country by providing the rural and all remote areas basic schools with trained teaching professionals.

• Change the work condition of these graduates as learnt in variation “change in x cause change in y”. This is to lay emphases on the change of educational background must affect the income or salary but this is not common in most of our private schools. We wish to use this project in motivating other Ghanaians to enroll in distance education to change their profiles.

• Creating jobs to assist our government in it’s ever struggle of reducing the high number of unemployment in the country.

• Sustainability

The project will be sustained through working closely with stakeholders and communities. The distance education has a long way to go in Ghana. For your perusal just have trip to visit the pilot centers the University of Cape Coast has built so fare in Accra (Maafio Hill and Kasoa) whereby those in other regions are on accelerated construction to believe in our long journey. The close collaboration with members’ organizations of the distance education and rural education promotion committees will go a long way in sustaining the project Rural Education effort. We also designed forms which will be sold to raise fund towards the life and sustainability of this initiative whenever finding donors prove difficult.

•Risks

The main risks involved will be the long term supply of trained teachers to our rural areas basic schools. This will be mitigated by the monitoring system which will enable our plan ahead on number of graduates to be posted. The other risk is the high acceptance of the new graduates. To get this in control, we’ve also designed our forms in three categories. These are:

Gold (gh cedis 200.00)
The graduates applying through the Gold application will be the first to be served plus other services and advantages which will be decided by the school board and working team.

Silver (gh cedis 150.00)
As we can see, this mean when the list of the gold applicants is exhausted we will refer to the Silver Applicants to fill the remaining vacant positions. They will also have some little advantages if able to secure a place.

Bronze (gh cedis 100.00)
The Bronze applicants will be the last group to be used in case we are not able to reach its targeted number of teachers for the year.

These application forms will work as the admission forms do. If you fail to secure a place means you must buy a new form the next year. One may ask, if all the applicants opted for the Gold application what can we do? This cannot happen, but as group of technocrats we have planned to use a system named FIFS (First In First Serve). This will in the long run serve the organization research to whether increase the coast of the form or reduce it. It wills also pave a way for us to decide for the sales of the form on yearly or after two to three years basis.

Another important issue which we are concerned with, is implementation of a soft loan known as “Motivation Loan”. This is a loan with zero interest to support our fresh teachers when the government allowance is in delay. This loan will be on monthly basis and will be paid back when our valuable teachers receive their back pay to enable us serve the future applicants. This will be apply to Gold applicants only should fund raising always prove difficult.

This is a great opportunity for investors to have impact on pupils lives by providing them with good basic education, which will determine their future lives and at the same time put food on the table, to unemployed graduates across the country. All investment will be returned with profit as the government and other organizations will later on finance the project. Even if this is not done the sales from our forms will be e great source of finance to pay our donors what they deserve at the due time of agreement.