The Ghana Education Service cannot continue to speak about digital transformation while simultaneously forcing teachers and administrators to endure outdated, paper-based administrative processes that belong to a bygone era.

The launch of the Ghana Education Service Information Management System (GESIMS), spearheaded by Dr Eric Nkansah, the immediate past Director General, and ably launched by Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, the immediate past Minister for Education, in 2024, was supposed to mark a decisive shift toward a modern, efficient, and transparent education administration. Yet, despite investing public resources into developing the platform, many critical administrative functions remain unnecessarily manual, creating frustration, delays, and needless costs for teachers, school administrators, and office administrators across the country.

Today, teachers are being directed to submit documents for verification, promotions, transfers, and other administrative purposes. The obvious question is: why should employees who already have records captured on a centralised digital platform be compelled to repeatedly print, transport, photocopy, and physically submit documents that should be accessible through a fully functional electronic system?

This is not modernisation. It is a duplication. It is inefficiency. It is administrative incompetence. It is an unnecessary burden imposed on hardworking education professionals.

If GESIMS was established as the official digital repository of staff information, then the Service must have the patriotism and commitment to fully utilise it. Teachers should not be spending their time and money moving documents from one office to another while government officials continue to celebrate digitalisation in speeches and policy statements.

The suspicion among many education professionals is that administrative inertia and political considerations have been allowed to override common sense and technological progress. Public institutions cannot continue to treat digital platforms as ceremonial political projects launched for headlines while maintaining the same cumbersome manual systems that have outlived their purpose in this day and age.

The victims of this contradiction are teachers, headmasters and headteachers, circuit supervisors, and regional and district officers who must navigate mountains of paperwork that technology was specifically designed to eliminate. Every unnecessary document submission represents wasted time, wasted resources, and lost productivity that could have been directed toward improving teaching and learning outcomes.

GES must rise above politics and fully operationalise GESIMS as the primary platform for document verification, promotions, transfers, staff management, administrative communication, and record keeping. The Service should trust the very system it introduced and stop transferring the cost of bureaucratic inefficiency onto teachers.

A twenty-first-century education system cannot be managed with nineteenth-century administrative practices. If the Ghana Education Service is serious about digital transformation, then management of the service must lead by example. The era of paper-chasing must end, and the era of digital governance must begin not in speeches, but in practice.