This year’s Northern Easter School opened at Wa on Monday with a call on educational administrators and experts to encourage people from Northern Ghana to take advantage of the wider access to tertiary education that now existed in the area to reduce their poverty levels. Professor Kaku Sagary Nokoe, Acting Vice-Chancellor of University for Development Studies (UDS) who made the call in a keynote address at the school said it was in line with this kind of pro-poor scholarship that UDS designed admission criteria and pedagogic approach to its programmes. A key feature of this approach he stated, was the Third Trimester Field Practical Training which gave students the opportunity to live with the rural people and apply the knowledge they acquired in the lecture halls to the real world situation. The Northern Easter School which is the brain child of the Institute of Adult Education of University of Ghana, Legon is held annually on rotational basis in one of the three regional capitals in the Northern, Upper East and West Regions. It provides the platform for participants with varying academic and professional backgrounds to brainstorm on issues geared towards confronting the challenges that militate against the development of Northern Ghana. This year’s school is under the theme; “Development of Northern Ghana Through Lifelong Learning”. Professor Nokoe suggested that traditional and opinion leaders should be beneficiaries of continuous and lifelong learning opportunities to enhance their understanding of important development issues and empower them to appreciate them better. He appealed to Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies to establish youth training schools to offer opportunities for school drop-outs to acquire employable skills. “Spending funds to encourage acquisition of skills and knowledge by will in the long run would be very beneficial because such youth are not available to be used to wage violent and armed conflicts,” he said. Mr Joseph Yieleh Chireh, Minister of Local Government and Rural Development called for the collaboration and integration of efforts among universities, enterprises and other stakeholders in the design and delivery of relevant programmes to promote lifelong learning for all sectors for the development of the country. Touching on Government’s development agenda for Northern Ghana, he said the proposed Savannah Accelerated Development Authority would be private sector led and assured all citizens that honesty and transparency would not be compromised in its operations. Mr Mahmud Khalid, Upper West Regional Minister said development of the human resource of Northern Ghana could not be achieved if lives continued to be lost through conflicts. He urged the people to ignore issues that divided them and resolved to live in peace as one people with a common destiny. Mr Khalid advised authorities of the Institute of Adult Education to institute mechanisms that could be used to access impact of deliberations at this year’s school in terms of participants’ post Easter school productivity at their workplaces. Source: GNA