Teachers' salaries paid from funeral donations

Teachers in a school at Akyem Manso in the Birim North District are paid their monthly salaries from funeral donations, while other teachers at Abokyikrom in Birim South are paid from the contributions of the village chief and his elders.

The precarious fate of those teachers and, by extension, their students and pupils became known to the Chronicle during a tour of the two districts.

The tour also revealed that the districts continue to have many deplorable school infrastructure, ineffective teaching and learning, as well as low enrolments, in spite of the modest injection of capital into educational delivery there by the local authorities and NGOs over the last decade.

"Every month we observe four funerals at least to collect donations from which we pay the teachers. Instead of organising say, all the funerals one weekend to save time and money, we have interspersed them ostensibly to reap the maximum donations to be able to pay our teachers." Obrempong Sintim Poku II, chief of Manso explained.

His is a community day secondary, Atweaman Secondary School. The six-year-old school has currently 125 students, 10 teachers and offers Business and Agriculture as main subject areas.

According to the chief, all attempts to get the Ghana Education Service (GES) to absorb the school into the public system and save his people the trouble for bearing its full costs have failed. He has, therefore, appealed to the authorities to go to his aid.