The Power of Protest in Underserved Communities: The Case of People’s Agency for Basic Quality Education in Ghana’s Rural Deprived

• In Event: Fostering Agency and Resistance in Out-Of-School and At-Risk Children Claim their Right to Education through Alternative and Innovative Education Programs

Proposal

The right to basic primary education has persisted since the 1960s in the debate on Ghana’s education reform agenda. Despite Ghana’s financial investments in education and the free compulsory basic education and free senior high school policies, a large proportion of rural children remain unable to access basic primary and junior high schools. In the five northern regions of the country, over 40-50% of the population still do not complete primary education. According to our recent out-of-school mapping study, over 30% of children between 6-11 years of age do not have access to primary school (Associates for Change 2022) . Despite the efforts to ensure primary schools are within a 3-5 km radius of communities, distance to school remains one of the key factors limiting access along with trained teachers’ refusal of postings to rural areas of the north (CDD, 2021; USAID 2021 ). Rural schools also tend to have limited teaching-learning resources.
We conducted a Political Economic Analysis in Ghana focused on the scaling up of accelerated education innovations. Through in-depth interviews, we gathered relevant data on learners, parents, teachers, Parent-Teacher Associations and School Management Committees from eight Directorates of the Ghana Education Service, and 32 communities across eight deprived districts in Northern Ghana over a three-year period.
It revealed that without parental voice, the ability of communities to stand up for this most basic human right of their children to education remains elusive. The findings show that reformists used powerful discourses of sustainable development goals, globalization and modernization to serve as anti-politics machines, which hide the fact that 80.7% of parents in rural communities lack formal education and agency to protest the unavailability of textbooks and classroom furniture in rural and extreme poor communities. Rural communities have weak bargaining power mediated by high illiteracy rates, remoteness, and low media presence to undertake collective action such as demonstrations, appeals and strikes for equitable distribution of educational resources. This exacerbates the communities’ depravity resulting in poor learning outcomes and creates an unequal playing field for students competing for limited positions at senior high school and tertiary levels. These in turn contribute to the persistent rise in the out-of-school population in rural communities of Ghana.
Rural communities lack an understanding of the politics of education and equity debates that can be used to lobby for equitable resource distribution. As such, this study recommends that human rights civil society organizations, the media, multilateral and bilateral organizations should build the capacities of rural communities using research and spaces to consult with particularly parents, Parent Teacher Associations and School Management Committees to understand the different forms of local resistance they can apply to demand equitable distribution of state resources for improved learning outcomes, one of which is accelerated education models.

Author

• :Leslie Casely-Hayford, Associates for Change