Community colleges to be set up in constituencies

Community Colleges to be set up in constituencies
Story: Lucy Adoma Yeboah
A NON-GOVERNMENTAL organisation, Ghana Community Colleges Organisation has been set up with the objective of providing education and training as a means to reducing or eradicating illiteracy in the country.
The purpose of the organisation is to build community colleges in all the 230 constituencies in the country.
A document made available by the Director of the organisation, Mr Kofi Annor indicated that a nation-wide project will be set-up to primarily concentrate on building new community colleges across the country.
“The primary goal of this project is to establish well organised community colleges which will provide and ensure quality educational opportunities to Ghanaians even in the most remote part of the county”, it pointed out.
It said the colleges shall be “open colleges” and will purely focus on providing new opportunities to youths and adults, both literate and illiterates.
“The organisation intends to work with the Ghana Education Service (GES) to improve literacy rate in the rural areas”, it stressed.
According to the organisation, when completed, all the community colleges will be used as job centres or as main sources of labour in each of the 230 constutuencies.
In an interview, Mr Kofi Annor said the reason for the project was the fact that several research works had revealed that a country could not develop unless it transformed its educational system.
He said the most efficient way of carrying out such a task of transformation was to ensure access to education through a targeted systematic and methodical approach to ensure that every citizen of Ghana had access to tertiary education regardless of their geographical positioning.
“Significant economic achievement anywhere is seldom if ever achieved without such momentous universal approach on education”’ he pointed out.
Mr Annor pointed out that 50 per cent of the project will be funded by foreign donor agencies through solicitation and the remaining 50 per cent raised locally through a national fund raising activity.