There should be deliberate policies to promote local language education – Adentan MP

The Member of Parliament for Adentan Constituency, Mohammed Adamu Rammadan, has stressed the need for deliberate policies aimed at promoting local language education in Ghana.

Speaking to the media at an event to mark International Mother Language Day on Wednesday, February 21, 2024, in Accra, he said deliberate efforts should be made to ensure teachers are trained to educate school children in the various local languages.

“That is one of the challenges we have; there are some languages that don’t even have teachers, so, there has to be a deliberate policy aimed at training teachers in all these languages to ensure that they are able to teach the children.

"Because you go to a district like Adentan where even the name suggests that predominantly the people are Gas, but you go to some of the schools and Ga is not taught because there is no teacher.

"So, I think it must be a deliberate effort and attempt to encourage people to learn these languages so that they can impart knowledge to our children,” he underscored.

The Deputy Director of Guidance and Counselling for the Ghana Education Service, Olivia Owusu, shared some of the significance of mother tongue education, including helping boost the confidence of school-going children to freely express themselves.

“It is also a very good way of manifesting our culture,” she stated.



She encouraged school authorities to desist from punishing students who speak local languages but rather inspire the students to express themselves with the languages.

On what necessitated the event held at the Flobar School in the Adentan Municipal Assembly to mark International Mother Language Day, Albert Koomson, the National Director of Ghana Reads Initiative, said the event was to serve as a platform to help parents understand the need for local language education.

“Some parents even speak only English with their children, and that is something we want to discourage,” he noted.



The Chief Executive Officer of Adwinsa Publications, Mr. Kwaku Oppong Amponsah, urged school authorities to adopt local language textbooks and storybooks as part of their teaching and learning materials.

“A lot of the schools do not consider books in local languages when recommending or looking for textbooks, but we are pleading that they also consider local language books,” he stated.

The Executive Director of Flobar School, Sandra Ama Addico, expressed her gratitude to the organizers of the event while urging parents to make local languages the first means of communication with their children at home.

The International Mother Language Day is a worldwide annual observance held on February 21 to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism.

GA/SARA