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The first batch of 450,000 free student tablets, wholly supported by the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND), will be given next week, according to a statement made by Minister of Education Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum.
He claims that the tablet distribution has been divided into three stages, with 450,000 devices going to 32 schools in order to guarantee the efficient distribution of 1.3 million tablets overall.
On March 25, President Akufo-Addo declared that public senior high school and technical and vocational education and training (TVET) students will get 1.3 million iPads.
He claims that this program, which is a component of the Smart School Project, is one of the steps the government is doing to make sure every industry in the nation is digital.
The Education Minister stated, “The 450,000 is a little less than 30%, the deployment is such that it is in three phases,” during a Saturday, March 30, interview on JoyNews’ Newsfile. The initial phase, which will begin to affect the regions and schools the next week, will target 32 schools spread throughout the 16 regions.
According to him, a mechanism has been developed to keep an eye on how the tablets are being distributed.
“Once it gets to the school, there is a dashboard that informs us the tablets are here. The whole idea is to ensure that you will do a phased approach to deployment and don’t get the system overwhelmed.”
“Once we get them to the 32 schools, then within a week or two thereafter the rest which is phase two also starts moving to the schools, so it’s a phased deployment” he noted.
He said the student mate one tablet comes with a keyboard as a complement that can make it function as a laptop or solely as a tablet.
“There’s also a power bank in it, and in case the power goes out, there’s a solar panel that allows you to charge it using solar in the case of this device. So, that is in response to the issue of erratic power supply at certain times.
The Minister clarified that this is a component of future efforts to integrate textbooks with tablets in an effort to progressively replace them.
He claims that instructors have been provided training by ICT Coordinators in the schools, and they will continue to provide excellent tablet usage instruction to the schools that get them. Dr. Adutwum explained that each pill costs $250 per unit, not GHS250.
The total cost of the 1.3 million tablets will be 337 million Ghana cedis, while the first 450,000 tablets will cost 112 million cedis.
The Bosomtwe MP clarified that the budgetary constraints of the Free SHS program are distinct from the logistical challenges of the program, and that funds allotted for this tablet project under the government’s digitalization agenda cannot be diverted to address feeding challenges faced by students under the policy. This raises the question of whether it was prudent for the government to spend enormous sums of money on free tablet distribution when the Free SHS policy was facing other pressing challenges.
“The interesting thing about Free SHS is that you can have logistical challenges and that’s not a budget issue, so we have 1.4 million children miles away that we are feeding a day, you can have challenges where food may not have reached a certain location on time.
“The idea is very simple; there are some people who will say use that in providing food for them, but no, there is a budget. There is a difference between a budget allocation and a cash flow allocation, so even if I want to, the law does not allow me to tell GETFUND that I need your money to buy food instead of the tablets you have allocated funds for in your funding formula, so there is a difference between a cash flow logistical issue and a budget issue” Dr Adutwum added.
Source: Ghanatodayonline.com
