W/R Minister Advocates Educational Policies Hinged on Critical Thinking, Financial Literacy

The Western Regional Minister, Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah says Ghana’s educational policies must address critical thinking hinged on financial literacy and entrepreneurship at the Senior High School Level.

This he believes is an effective educational policy initiation.

The Western Regional Minister indicated “policies of open critical thinking that would be hinged on financial literacy programme and entrepreneurship be taught at the second cycle level so that we would have a critical mass of enterprise thinking mindset of our population who could create businesses to expand the private sector employability.”

He maintained that it is about time all stakeholders assist policy makers to analyze existing policies, and again, take an active role in policy development as well as leading discussions during policy initiation, planning, implementation and evaluation which would provide positive feedback.

Honourable Darko-Mensah was speaking at a stakeholders retreat organized by the Western Regional Directorate of Education on the theme, “Reviewing and Reassessing Educational Policy For Effective Service Delivery And National Transformation”.

Using the Free SHS as the case study, he enumerated the enormous benefits the program has accrued us as a Region.

Honourable Darko-Mensah said “The significant leap of enrollment from 13,210 in 2017 to 63,631 in 2022. Notwithstanding the gains, I call on stakeholders to corroborate the efforts with monitoring and evaluation through the setting up of units which would be responsible for the progress and improvement of the Free SHS policy and future ones that might be initiated.”

He continued :”the NPP government has doubled employment in the public sector from 320,000 to 720,000 which is only 5% if compared to the adult population of 17,000,000 (95%). Therefore, 90% are yet to be absorbed into the employment bracket.”