The United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) in Ghana this year is spending around £65 million of aid in the bid to end extreme poverty and to help children succeed with access to education.

Mrs Pamela Jenkins, Team Leader, Human Development Team, DFID, said about the same amount is reaching Ghana from their centrally managed programmes and from the UK share of multilateral contributions.

She said the priority of the British Government is to help Ghana get back on track to becoming a solid and sustainable middle income country, able to fund its own development in time.

Mrs Jenkins made these remarks in Accra, during the launch of the British Council’s phase three of the Connecting Classrooms programme.

She said the support is focused on working with the Government to strengthen macro-economic management.

She noted that the DFID supported over 140,000 children in basic education; and also provided over 30,000 girls with incentives to attend secondary school and expect this number to reach 80,000 by the end of the year.

She said the DFID supported over 600,000 people to access family planning, purchased and distributed nearly 5.5 million bed-nets and provided over 160,000 of the poorest people with cash transfers.

The DFID also supported over 140,000 children in basic education and provided over 30,000 girls with incentives to attend secondary school and expect this number to reach 80,000 by the end of this year.

The key components of the DFID Ghana’s education programme in Ghana are Girls Participatory Approaches to Student Success (G-PASS), Complementary Basic Education, and Education Quality Improvement Project (EQUIP).

She said the G-PASS is a £ 47 million programme, ending in 2018, which sought to address the economic challenge on households of putting girls through secondary school, by providing scholarships packages to 80,000 vulnerable girls in 75 deprived districts and in selected Senior High Schools.

Mrs Jenkins said G-PASS works with national bodies and all 38 Colleges of Education to improve quality of education and also enhances the institutional capacity of the Ghana Education Service from national to district levels to improve gender data collection, analysis, planning, target setting and monitoring.

She said the complementary Basic Education, which runs until 2017-18; is a £ 27.9 million programme (£ 10 million of this is USAID funding), which provides support to out of school children, giving them a nine month intensive course to enable them to transition back to primary education.

She pointed out that the EQUIP is a £25m programme, which ends this year.

She said EQUIP provided over 12 million text books and teachers’ guides for every basic school in the country on the three core subjects of Maths, English and Science.

Mrs Jenkins said DFID is associated with Connecting Classrooms and to be funding the project, which directly contributes to DFID’s aim of working more effectively with young people to improve the wellbeing of young people in the poorest countries so that no-one is left behind.

Connecting Classrooms, a programme the British Council has run since 2008, has developed long-term, sustainable partnerships, support schools and the wider community in developing successful, educational partnerships between schools in the UK and schools in other parts of the world in over 30 countries.

In Ghana, the Connecting Classrooms Phase three will within three years build the capacity of over 10,000 teachers and 2,000 school heads to support them integrate core skills they have learnt into the curriculum.

The phase three aims at improving teaching in both Ghana and the UK in areas such as professional development for teachers and sustainable partnerships between schools in Ghana and the UK.