Candidates writing the on-going Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE) in the Afram Plains reportedly stayed at the examination centers for the entire duration of the exams.
This is because of the distance from their respective villages to the only two examination centers.
A local manager of a Roman Catholic school in the Afram Plains, Father Steven Kofi Sakpaku who revealed this on the Citi Breakfast Show explained the harsh conditions the pupils and parents endure during the examination season.
[contextly_sidebar id=”euWD8IknM9ltEwJPJ8BX9w2auKd6XkQz”]“When it is exam time, they have to leave their houses…Afram Plains is a wide area and all these people from the islands will all gather at these two centers and their parents will give them money to stay there for the whole week.”
“The distance between the villages and the examination centers is about 15 kilometers and it can take you two to three hours to get a car so they can’t walk and come and write so we congregate all of them at the center – not to talk about those who are on the islands where cars go there only on Wednesdays and Thursdays,” he explained.
According to Reverend Father, the cancellation of five BECE papers will financially and psychologically affect the pupils and their parents.
“A parent I was talking to yesterday gave only GHC 15 to her daughter and now she is complaining over how she is going to get money for her daughter to go back and write,” he said.
Grouped in Afram Plains
Father Sakpaku further disclosed that people living in the Afram Plains are grouped into three colours; green, yellow and red.
“The green are those of us along the road; we see cars and we have light. The yellow are those who see cars only on Wednesdays and Thursdays which are market days and those in the red zone, they don’t see cars, they don’t see light and children are in all these areas.”
He stressed the cancelled papers is presently taking a toll on the pupils because “when you look at the situation here, the trauma we go through before we write the exams is not easy.”
“We have to go to the rural areas and bring these children to write the exams,” he lamented, “They are writing under stressed situations – they go through torture, they go through pain, they struggle to write the exam so going through that pain and to hear that your papers has been cancelled is pathetic,” he added.
By: Selassie A. Amissah Mensah /citifmonline.com/Ghana