Some candidates in the upcoming Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in the Savelugu Municipality have abandoned their classrooms to practice “Kayaye” (Head Potter job) in urban centers across the country.
The Girl Child Education Officer for the Savelugu Municipality Hajia Sulemana Sanatu, revealed this during a review meeting of stakeholders in the REACH project in the Municipality.
Kayaye is a term used to describe persons who migrate from rural communities mostly in the Northern part of Ghana to work as head porters in urban centers particularly Kumasi and Accra.
The phenomenon is widespread among teenage girls, according to Hajia Sanatu, boys have also joined the bandwagon in recent times, raising fears that efforts to reduce illiteracy and poverty in the Municipality could be greatly affected. “Now the boys have taken up the whole show, leaving the girls.
Recently there was a research conducted and we realized that, those who are currently in JHS three, the boys who registered for BECE and left for Kayaye are more than the girls who left; kayaye is hindering education in the Municipality,” she said.
The Reaching and Teaching out of school children (REACH) project is modeled on the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) program.
The programme is being implemented by Plan Ghana across eleven districts in the Northern, Volta and Eastern Regions. The project enrolls children of school going age into nine month mother tongue literacy and numeracy school.
At the end of the nine month cycle, the children are placed in formal school to continue with their education.
The Savelugu municipality is one of the three districts in the Northern Region benefiting from the programme.
According to the Project Manager for Plan Ghana Northern Regional Support Office, Sulemana Gbana, the initiative is part of efforts to get more children aged 8 to 14 enrolled into formal school.
He said the five year project started in 2015 and it is expected that, by the end of the project in 2019, ninety thousand out of school children would have enrolled into the programme.
Source: GBCONLINE
