Right To Play Ghana has raised alarm over severe teacher shortages in cocoa-growing communities, with some schools operating with only three teachers instead of the required nine.

The deficit has forced many teachers into stressful multi-grade teaching, handling multiple classes with different curricula and abilities, which overloads educators and compromises learning outcomes.

Stakeholders at the Annual National Learning Forum of the My Life My Rights project are calling for urgent deployment of more teachers to mitigate the acute teacher attrition situation undermining the delivery of quality education.

The My Life My Rights project, now in its third year, seeks to improve the protective environment for children in cocoa-growing communities through quality education, child protection, and livelihood empowerment.

Project Manager, Julius Kwame Tsatsu, explained that attrition is a major setback to efforts to keep children in schools.

He is also advocating for increased budgetary allocation and logistics for social workers in underserved communities in cocoa-growing areas.

“If teachers are engaging in multi-grading, one teacher is handling class,
one class to class three, it affects the quality of teaching because the curriculum for each of the classes is different. there are different abilities, so putting more than one class together, a teacher himself will be too stressed, overloaded and confused,” he said.

“The second point is allocating adequate resources to our social workers, especially the Department of Social Welfare. National stakeholders should focus on budgetary allocations
for adequate resources for these social workers to be able to follow up on cases and ensure that cases get proper closure,” he said.

The forum was held under the theme “Strengthening Quality Education Through Child Protection and Inclusive Practice.”

The forum, which reviewed the second year of the Yonkopa Cocoa-sponsored project, highlighted gains in child protection while stressing the need to strengthen community and district structures for sustainability.

“Previously, cases were being shielded, or people were not aware they needed to talk about them. But with the awareness, cases are coming up, and we have seen that the level of perpetration has reduced because we are dealing with the cases.

“The project had established and trained Child Protection Committees in 20 communities and four District Child Protection Committees (DCPCs), equipping them with skills and mechanisms to handle and resolve cases at the local level,” he said.

The project operates in 50 communities across the Ashanti and Ahafo regions.

The Interim Country Director of Right to Play in Ghana, Iljitsi Wemerman, described investing in children as a smart choice for the nation’s future.

“Investing in children is one of the smartest and most powerful choices we can make - for our communities and for Ghana as a whole. We need to strengthen our collaboration, deepen our commitment, and move from learning to action. Let this forum lead to concrete steps and measurable changes, especially in how we strengthen child protection and inclusive education in practice,” he said

Director of Pre-Tertiary Education at the Ministry of Education, Nana Baffour Awuah, said the project aligns with government efforts to bring out-of-school children back into the classroom through holistic and collaborative strategies.

“This initiative aligns very well with the goals of the education directorate, especially the pre-tertiary directorate. Where we are trying to bring learners who are out of classrooms. And there are a lot of strategies, and this initiative is a very important one. Relevant agencies should be part of co-creation to bring a holistic approach to addressing the issue in its entirety,” he said.