‘Refund our money or we close down offices’- angry teachers march over 1teacher-1laptop

A group of teachers took to the streets of Accra to demonstrate against the government’s one teacher-one laptop initiative and threatened to close down their offices if the Ghana Education Services fail to refund all their deductions made from their welfare funds to pay for the computers under controversial circumstances.

The teachers marched to the offices of the various teacher unions in Accra on Wednesday, 15 December 2021, to register their kick against the deductions.

The teachers are to pay 30% of the cost of the laptops whilst the government absorbs the 60%.

But, this did not sit well with some of the teachers who concluded that the laptops are of inferior quality and, so, do not see much gainful sense in paying for them.

Vice-president Dr Mahamudu Bawumia on Friday, 3 September 2021, launched the One Teacher-One Laptop programme and handed over 350,000 computers to the teachers at a brief ceremony on the campus of St Mary’s Senior High School.

He said it is in fulfilment of the government’s pledge to equip Ghana’s teachers with the requisite ICT skills to prepare the next generation for the fourth industrial revolution.

“I underscored that effective teaching and learning is critical to developing the human capacity for work, innovation and creativity; necessary ingredients for capacity building”, Dr Bawumia later wrote on his Facebook page.

He said “teachers are indispensable pillars to this necessary capacity building”.

This initiative, in collaboration with the teacher unions, “is to support the vision of the Ghana Education Service of creating an enabling environment to facilitate effective teaching and learning”, Dr Bawumia said.

He said the government will provide teachers in Ghana with laptops preloaded with educational materials and with access to an e-library equipped with books recommended by the GES on the various subjects.

“The materials can be accessed whether online or offline”, adding: “With free Wi-Fi available in 722 senior high schools across the country, access to the almost innumerable resources available on the internet is expected to aid research, teaching and learning”.

It is important to anchor the point that the memory capacity of the laptop is very According Ghana Education Watch, a Civil Society Organisation with focus on the sector.

Source: africaneditors.com