A consortium of four Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) operating in the Northern parts of Ghana, are supporting four districts with a 150,000 dollar scheme to improve the standard of education towards transforming their societies. The beneficiary districts are Gushegu and Karaga districts in the Northern Region and Buila and Nandoli Districts in the Upper East and Upper West districts, respectively. Mr. Alhassan Abdulai Iddi, Executive Director of Net Organization for Your Empowerment and Development, (NOYED-Ghana) announced the package at Gushegu on Tuesday at the inauguration of a District Employment Task Force (DELTA Force) that would oversee the implementation of the programme. The organisation, Strengthening Transparency, Accountability and Responsiveness, (STAR-Ghana) is funding the project dubbed: “CETA-plus.” The project seeks to implement recommendations of a study conducted in 2009, which indicated that those districts lacked professional teachers and that the Community Education Teaching Assistants Programme (CEPA) needed to be assisted. Mr. Iddi stressed that the beneficiary districts lacked professional teachers leaving the bulk of the teaching responsibilities on those under the National Youth Employment Programme, saying the NYEP teachers were doing very well and were committed to their jobs and so they should be assisted to upgrade themselves. He appealed to the NYEP stakeholders to consider assisting the teachers to enrol in the Untrained Teacher’s Programme to be absorbed into the public payroll, saying that by doing so most of the vacant teaching positions would be filled. “There are currently more than 200 vacant teaching positions in Gushegu alone,” he said. Mr. Iddi called for the alignment of the NYEP Module with the National Youth Policy (2010) and urged the government to increase and sustain funding for the NYEP. He indicated that most of the few professional teachers in the area were irregular at school while some schools also lacked teaching and learning materials. Mr. Gaskin Dasaah, National Coordinator of the Northern Network for Education Development (NNED), said NNED is the lead NGO in the consortium and noted that each of the NGOs was implementing similar projects in the four districts. Mr. Dasaah said NNED is working towards facilitating the process for NYEP teachers to be given the opportunity to undertake a four-year professional teachers’ programme and still receive their allowances. Source: GNA