Education
Children’s life chances are strongly influenced by the quality of their education. The background of students and family also plays an important role on their performance as students from families with low education, negative attitudes towards schooling, inability to support their children, or poverty-stricken single parents have a higher likelihood of dropping out. Many individuals who leave school without minimum skills may remain unskilled for the rest of their life.
It is against this backdrop that OSDA and its like-minded partners are playing a supportive role to rural schools in providing children with knowledge, skills, interpersonal competencies and basic infrastructure required for their development which is in line with UNESCO’s study that if all students in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty. This is equal to a 12% cut in global poverty.
Ideally, there should be adequate teaching and learning material for every school going child, but the case is very different in the rural schools. In an attempt to close the gaps in some schools, OSDA donates teaching and learning material as well as school uniforms to some rural schools in order to facilitate teaching and learning in those schools.
OSDS focuses its education support on access, quality, retention, and equity by supporting deprived schools with educational material (school uniforms, exercise books, etc.) construction of schools, libraries, and other learning centers, as well as developing and maintaining electricity supplies to the schools in cooperation with local communities.
OSDA volunteers mostly support teachers with teaching in basic, junior high and senior high schools in basic English language, Mathematics, Science, ICT in Basic schools (Primary & Junior High), and or English language, Core (Mathematics, Science), Elective (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology), and ICT.
As part of our program, we run voluntary teaching projects in which our foreign volunteers are placed in the rural schools to provide supportive roles to teachers in order to boost education in those communities. The voluntary teaching program is designed to also give opportunity to individuals who are genuinely interested in offering their expertise and labour for the welfare of others.
This is in line with our cultural and knowledge exchange program as volunteers recruited to play a supportive role in the schools within the rural communities in Ghana by assisting local teachers with classes and teaching school pupils in subjects such as English, Maths and ICT. Volunteers also organise extra classes during vacation and motivate students to do their assignments while they are afforded the opportunity to integrate into the Ghanaian local community, learn about indigenous traditional cultural practices and tour the rest of Ghana and neighbouring countries.
