The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, has called for the piloting of Chinese language in selected public schools before any decision is taken to scale it up nationwide.

He believes the pilot should be used to assess the effectiveness and relevance of Mandarin in Ghana’s basic education system before a broader rollout.

“We have to pilot it and the outcomes of the pilots determine whether we scale up or not,” he said on Joy FM's Newsnight on Wednesday, September 16

According to Mr Asare, there is already a foundation for teaching Mandarin in Ghana, with the language being offered in some schools and tertiary institutions.

He noted that more than 15,000 Ghanaians have been trained in Mandarin over the past decade through partnerships involving the Confucius Institute at the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast.

“There is nothing wrong with piloting a language, which is already being introduced in our tertiary institutions, which over 15,000 have been trained in in the past ten years,” he said.

Mr Asare also argued that piloting Chinese in public schools could help address inequalities in access to subjects that are currently more readily available in some private schools.

He said Chinese is among the subjects that parents who can afford private education can access for their children, making a public-school pilot an opportunity to broaden access.

“If we have an opportunity to pilot one of these competitive subjects, I don't think that we should object to it at all. We should embrace the opportunity and pilot it,” he said.

He added that the outcome of the pilot should determine the next step.

“If the pilot's outcome suggests that it is worthy of application in public schools, fine. If the pilot's outcome shows otherwise, then we overhaul,” Mr Asare stated.

Mr Asare’s comments come amid an ongoing debate over the Education Minister’s remarks on a policy to introduce Arabic and Chinese in Ghanaian schools, with stakeholders divided over the need, scope and implementation of the policy, while the government maintains that there is no policy to that effect.