School fees for needy pupils

A key project in Friends of Tafo's support for children's education is funding children who have difficulty meeting the cost of attending school, whether at Primary, Junior High or Senior High level. The community's top priority in their vision for education in the town is "no more street children", and the KTDC works vigilantly to get every child into school.

 

Ghana abolished school fees in an immediate response to the debt cancellation which resulted from the G8 conference in 2006, but every child still has to have a uniform, exercise books and basic stationery, and the cost of this - about GBP7 a year - is beyond some parents and guardians.

 

Accordingly the Kwahu-Tafo Development Council systematically invites applications from parents, guardians, head teachers and pupils, subjects them to scrutiny and where appropriate commissions the uniform and/or supplies the stationery (directly to the pupil's school).

 

In a development for 2008-2009 the KTDC has decided that the supply of stationery will be conditional on the parents supplying the uniform - a collaboration which is aimed at decreasing individual dependency on limited funds, while also enabling available resources to be more widely applied.

 

One of the current beneficiaries is Ofori Yeboah (13).  He was found by the KTDC Chairperson trying to get manual work as a 9 year-old on the site of the Senior Secondary School. It turned out that, his mother having aboned him at birth and his grandmother being unable to cope, he had never been to school.  Now he is a promising pupil cathcin up fast at the Experimental Primary School, where his favourite subject is Maths, and his ambition is to be a soldier. In gratitude for his "rescue" four years ago, he took the names of the Chairperson and the Director of Projects. This assistance has come directly through the generosity of FOT supporters.

 

 

We present details of a few of the other children we have helped, below.

Who we are - Friends of Tafo Committee