Government scholarship awards lack transparency, fairness - MPs, CSOs

Members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education have expressed worry and raised key issues distorting the processes in awarding scholarships to needy and deserving students in Ghana.

The MPs assert that the processes of awarding government scholarships to students have been fraught with unfairness and obscurity.

One of the Government Scholarships awarding entities is the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat which is an organisation under the office of the President with the mandate to handle and award government scholarships towards human resource development and growth for the country.

However, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education as well as some Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in the country have some reservations about the doings and processes that lead to the award of the scholarships in recent times.

At a tripartite meeting between the Parliamentary Select Committee, Education Ministry, and the Ghana Education Service as well as CSOs, stakeholders advocated that the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat needs to urgently address the key challenges raised at the meeting.

Some of the participants on the sidelines of the meeting facilitated by STAR-Ghana Foundation shared their views with GhanaWeb in Koforidua.

"I think that they are not transparent enough. Because even at this point that they have decentralized it to the districts level...when I came to office, heard of it from parliament, I was looking forward to them to inviting me to the meeting to interview the applicants.

"For the first one they didn't invite me but I found out and went there myself. So, subsequently, they invited me.

"As we speak, now, when I attended that meeting, the traditional rep was not there, and as we speak now those we interviewed were over 100 applicants. We have not been informed as to how many people they have been able to select to have gained scholarships.

"So, we need them to give us this information so that it will help us. Some of us, our traditional authorities give scholarships, the scholarship secretariat is giving and then the people also come to the MPs for scholarships.

"So if they are able to give us this information, nobody will come and have a double-take of scholarship because there are a number of people who want the scholarship. We are asking them to be transparent enough," Rita Naa Odoley Sowah, MP for La Dadekotopon expressed.

On her part, the MP for Agona East, Queenstar Pokua Sawyer, expressed oblivion about the selection criteria being used by the Scholarship Secretariat.

"If about 40,000 people apply and you have to select about 30,000, what is the merit, based on what? So I insisted that they should make sure that the MPs become part of the final selection.

"And it becomes political if you leave it to the MMDCEs to make that decision alone. In my constituency, for instance, Agona East, I do not even know those who qualified for it.

"People will want the system to be fair. So the MMDCEs should stop misbehaving and make things fair," Queenstar Pokua Sawyer said.

For MP for Amenfi Central, Peter Yaw Kwakye-Ackah, "I believe that the work they are doing is not helping the country at all. From the exposition they gave, what they are doing is not known to the population. It's not known at all."

According to him, the Scholarship Secretariat processes are "shrouded in secrecy" especially when it comes to the awarding of foreign scholarships which he alleged are given to only cronies of those in power.

The MP called for a relook at how scholarships are given so that it will bring more value to Ghana than more losses.

The Executive Director for STAR Ghana Foundation, Amidu Ibrahim-Tanko, expressed satisfaction about the Select Committee's intention to take the matter further by inviting leaders of the scholarship awarding organisations to appear before Parliament soon.