In recent years, the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) has digitised its project management, monitoring and evaluation to enhance efficiency and transparency.

This means personnel from the Fund do not have to physically visit project sites to update themselves on projects as they could monitor the contractors with the help of technology.

These are part of the reforms that have been instituted by GETFund under the leadership of the Administrator, Richard Ampofo Boadu.

GETFund project portfolio

So far, 11,248 projects have been initiated since the inception of GETFund in the year 2000 by Act of Parliament, Act 581.

These include 6,272 projects at the basic education level, 3,863 secondary school improvement projects, 101 E-blocks, nine model schools four TVET centres as well as 999 projects at the tertiary levels.

Addressing a forum in Accra on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, Dr Boadu indicated the reforms will “ensure transparency and effective outcomes.”

Some of the deliverables from reforms he noted, include “streamlining eligibility criteria, digitise application process, emphasis on STEM subjects and increased support for girl-child education this giving extra weighing to female applicants.”

Solving embarrassing problems

According to the GETFund Administrator, the reforms have also "overhauled the bottlenecks that created the embarrassing situation of foreign scholars’ fees and stipends not being paid on time with harrowing consequences among as well as scholarship programme monitoring."

He disclosed: “The Fund’s scholarship reforms have borne fruits concerning foreign scholarships as it moved from awarding 104 at graduate and undergraduate levels in 2017/2018 to 352 in 2019/2020 academic years.

“At the local level award level, the number of awardees at all levels stood at 333 in 2017/2018, jumping to 1,680 in the 2022/2023 academic year and to over 4,200 in the 2022/2023 academic year,” Dr Boadu added.

The core mandate of GETFund is to provide funding to supplement government efforts for the provision of educational infrastructure and facilities within the public sector from the pre-tertiary to the tertiary levels.

Increase in local scholarships

Meanwhile, 5,026 persons have benefited from local scholarships for the 2023/2024 academic year.

It is a sharp rise from the number that was awarded to applicants in the 2019/2020 academic year which stood at 1,680.

The majority of the local scholarships estimated at 74%, go to public universities.