Dubai cares moves to support kindergarten Education in Ghana

Dubai Cares, has announced its support to a three-year teacher training program in Ghana to upgrade kindergarten (KG) education and enable KG schoolchildren to flourish in primary school.

The $469,000 program, in partnership with Sabre Education, is set to benefit 7,420 teachers directly and 7,700 KG schoolchildren aged 4-6 years indirectly, in the country’s Central and Western regions.

Dubai Cares’ support aims to enhance early years’ pre-service teacher training in Ghana, building on five years of successful implementation and replication of Sabre Education’s Fast-track Transformational Teacher Training (FTTT) program in the Central and Western Regions of the country.

The program also seeks to upgrade existing kindergarten (KG) classrooms through teacher training and learning resources, converting them into model practice classrooms for KG1 and KG2, which can host high quality practical placements for student teachers.

“The (FTTT) program is globally recognised as an integrated approach to systemic change that addresses education inequalities for four- and five-year-old Ghanaian girls and boys and promotes active and play based learning as a foundation for 21st century skills,” explained Dominic Bond, Chief Executive Officer, Sabre Education. The program also aims to promote sustainability through empowering the teacher training colleges and Ghana Education Service to continue supporting and monitoring newly qualified teachers.

“Ghana is a great example of how investing in education can positively uplift an entire nation.

“Thanks to increased government spending, the country has had strong economic growth in the last two decades, fuelled by a better educated and more mobile work force that aspires for better job opportunities in a more diversified economy and saw the country’s poverty rate cut by half over the same period,” said Annina Mattsson, Programs Director at Dubai Cares.

Ghana has witnessed steady improvements in education over the past three decades with mean years of schooling increasing by 2.2. The KG teaching profession continues to suffer from stigmatisation, portraying KG teachers as the least skilled, and the early years as less important than primary and secondary schooling.