President John Dramani Mahama has announced plans to construct 30 new E-block secondary schools across the country, with most of the facilities to be located in densely populated communities.
The President said the new schools would be constructed from scratch under the government’s Star J Project and would primarily operate as community day schools.
Speaking at Paga in the Upper East Region on Thursday, August 13, 2026, during his ongoing engagement with citizens, President Mahama said the initiative was aimed at bringing secondary education closer to children, particularly those living in heavily populated areas.
“Now under the Star J Project, we’re going to build another 30 new E-blocks. These 30 from scratch,” he said.
He explained that the new facilities were separate from the abandoned E-block projects inherited by his administration, which government is also working to complete.
“The ones I talked about earlier was, we’re finishing the abandoned ones. But with this we’re going to build another 30 new E-blocks across the country. So, there will be 30 new secondary schools across the country,” he added.
President Mahama said a major consideration in determining the locations of the new schools would be population density.
“A lot of these new ones are going to be in high population density areas,” he said.
According to him, major cities and other densely populated communities would be prioritised to ensure that students can attend secondary school within or close to their communities.
“So in some of the major cities across the country, we will put E-blocks in high-density areas so that those will be community day schools,” the President explained.
He said the approach would help reduce the distance students travel to school and make secondary education more accessible.
“It means the children can even walk from home to the secondary school,” he said.
President Mahama noted that the location of some E-blocks constructed during his previous administration had presented different challenges because they were situated in rural districts where communities were widely scattered.
He explained that students in such areas often had to travel long distances to attend the schools.
“But with schools like this, those we started in our previous term, several of them are situated in rural districts and we know that the children come from different communities across the district and so it’s difficult for the children to commute daily to school,” he said.
The President said the difficulty in daily commuting had resulted in some of the earlier E-block schools being converted into boarding facilities.
“And so that’s why several of those schools were converted into boarding schools,” he added.
The new E-blocks, he said, would therefore be strategically located to serve communities with high populations and improve access to secondary education.
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