The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch (EduWatch), Kofi Asare, has called on Ghana to scrap teacher trainee allowances and replace automatic graduate recruitment with a vacancy-based hiring model, arguing that both policies waste public money while failing to put the right teachers in the right classrooms.
Speaking on TV3’s Agenda on Tuesday, May 12, Asare said the GHC203 million the government spent on teacher trainee allowances in 2025 represents a straightforward misallocation that could instead fund the salaries of hundreds of working teachers placed where they are actually needed.
“That amount can hire about 400 teachers every year,” he told TV3.
He extended the same critique to nursing trainee allowances, which he estimated at approximately GHC500 million annually, describing both programmes as politically motivated spending that long-term education reform must move beyond.
The sharper edge of Asare’s argument, however, was his push for a structural overhaul of how Ghana recruits teachers after graduation. He described the current system, in which graduates are posted broadly and left to find their footing, as inefficient and misaligned with actual school-level demand. In its place, he proposed a model used in the United Kingdom and Canada, where district-level advertisements go out for specific vacancies at named schools, and applicants compete based on subject expertise and suitability for that particular post.
He argued that tying employment to a specific school and location would eliminate mismatched placements, close staffing gaps in underserved areas more effectively, and bring greater accountability to a recruitment process that currently rewards credentials over fit.
Asare maintained that Ghana’s education system will continue to underperform as long as it prioritises expensive legacy policies over evidence-based reforms that direct resources where they produce measurable outcomes.
