President Nana Akufo-Addo has said his government will prioritize technical education and skills development of students in the country’s senior high schools and tertiary institutions, as it holds the key to the country’s industrial development.
President Akufo-Addo said, “if the ambitions we have for this country are going to come to fruition, a great deal of it depends on what is going to happen in places like this. You are going to be at the centre of the industrial revolution of our country. That revolution needs to happen now if Ghana is going to make progress.”
The President noted that “all those countries in the world that used to be like us, but are now places of prosperity and development, became so because they paid a great deal of attention and committed a lot of resources to the development of their educational system, especially the development of their technical and scientific education.”
President Akufo-Addo made this known on Sunday, 14th May, 2017, when he addressed students of the Ho Technical University at the climax of his 2-day visit to the Volta Region.
The President stressed that if Ghana is to emulate the successes of the Asian tigers, especially countries who gained their independence at the same time as Ghana, then technical institutions must have priority in the country’s educational expenditure.
It is for this reason, he said, that the process of reorganizing and re-prioritizing the country’s educational expenditure is on-going, evident in the 2017 Asempa Budget ensuring a substantial increase in the budgetary allocation to the educational sector.
Technical education, the President indicated “is the key to our future. Whatever we can do to support your development, to make it relatively easy for you to study hard and to get the information to be able to contribute to the progress and development of the country, the Akufo-Addo administration is going to do exactly that.”
President Akufo-Addo continued, “We cannot continue to be raw material producing and exporting countries, depending on the production of unprocessed cocoa or unprocessed gold. There is no future in that for us as a people. We will continue to be poor if we go down that line. We must make a systematic effort to change the structure of our economy. We cannot do it unless we have people like you primed and ready to assist the process of transformation.”
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By: Sammi Wiafe/citifmonline.com/Ghana