Under the free Senior High School (SHS) policy, at least 30 percent of places in the country’s elite senior high schools will be reserved solely for students from the public schools and deprived communities, Minister for Education, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has stated.

According to him, this would ensure that children from these schools and communities are also given the opportunity to benefit from quality education and the use of good facilities in these elite schools to realise their potential.

Government ‘s underpinning philosophy of the free SHS, he added, is that that no child should be denied the opportunity of senior high school education by reason of their family’s financial circumstances.

The government, he further mentioned, is committed to providing more opportunities for girls in particular to access secondary education through the Secondary Education Improvement Project (SEIP) Scholarships Scheme.

The SEIP Scholarships Scheme is designed to provide scholarships to needy students to access secondary education. The SEIP scholarships will be awarded in the ratio 60 to 40 in favour of girls.

Dr Prempeh was delivering a keynote address at the Camfed and MasterCard Foundation Scholars Annual Learning Summit in Accra.

He applauded Camfed Ghana for their focus on preparing the youth for employment through educational opportunities and been at the forefront of the campaign for female education and women’s leadership in Ghana.

Dr Prempeh said government, therefore, appreciates the support and role of development partners, such as Camfed, whose interventions in the education sector have enabled many children in the country to have an education.

The government, he pledged, will continue to collaborate and work with Camfed Ghana to enhance access to quality education for all Ghanaian children of school-going age.

The Regional Executive Director of Camfed Ghana, Mrs Dolores Dickson, in her welcome address, said her outfit, in partnership with MasterCard Foundation, is implementing a transition programme titled ‘Enable Young Women Transition from School to Entrepreneurship – Further Study and Transformative Leadership in Ghana’.
This, she explained, is to address the peculiar changes young people face in their transition from secondary school.
According to her, the design of the transition programme is based on Camfed Ghana and the MasterCard Foundation’s shared belief that further education, employment and entrepreneurship, are some of the most viable pathways to economic security for the majority of young people.

The focus, she explained, is to create the enabling environment and promote access to new resources for young people to put them on sound footing to be able to meet the challenges ahead.

This year’s summit is the fourth in series as the first edition in 2014 set the tone for successive ones under the Scholars programme which is a 10-year partnership between Camfed and the MasterCard foundation.

This year’s summit under the theme ‘Preparing Students for Employment and Entrepreneurship: What works?’, critically examined the range of transition programs available to support students transition from school to entrepreneurship, employment and further study in Ghana.

It also provided the platform for participants to dispassionately discuss the issue of transition for young people especially women in Ghana.