The Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) is a public trust fund set up by an Act of Parliament in 2000 to provide funding to supplement the government?s efforts to provide education infrastructure from pre-tertiary to the tertiary level.
The fund accrues from 2.5 per cent VAT imposed on selected goods and services specifically to fix the funding gap in education.
Many hostels, classrooms and bungalows have been constructed in tertiary institutions, ?especially the universities and polytechnics with funds from the GETFund.
As is normal with the imposition of all taxes, the GETFund was greeted with protests from a section of the public led by the Minority in Parliament at the time. Today, nobody disputes that the government at the time took the right decision to impose a levy on some goods and services in order to raise the revenue to fund education.
The decision was informed by the realisation that the education infrastructure put in place by successive governments was no longer adequate to accommodate the growing number of youth desirous of pursuing higher education.
The phenomenon of non-residential students became very common in the 1980s and 1990s when the government was not able to update the residential facilities in the universities. Following pressure from the government and parents for enrolments to be expanded in the universities, the school administrators started admitting more students but the facilities were inadequate.
Then the Rawlings administration had a ?dream? and that was that the best way out was to introduce a levy to address the infrastructure deficit in the universities. For about a decade, the GETFund was able to provide funding for many construction works in the universities and polytechnics.
Although there is still room for more residential and academic facilities in the universities, the result of that singular intervention is there for all to see, especially those who care to see the strides we have made collectively.
When people began to see the good fruits that the GETFund was bearing, educational administrators at other levels and sectors, including the private schools, demanded their ?pound of flesh?; after all, the GETFund accrues from the taxes all consumers pay, irrespective of where one?s child attends school.
Perhaps the expansion in the number of projects that the GETFund now funds has overstretched the budget of the fund to the extent that many projects have been abandoned and for some time now, some heads of second cycle institutions have been complaining about delays in the execution of their GETFund projects.
These school heads are not alone in the appeal to the government to release the statutory funds to the contractors to complete their work on the projects.
The Daily Graphic concedes that if the inflows from the taxes do not meet the budgetary targets, certainly, the government cannot meet its commitments to the GETFund and other obligations. Whatever, the challenge, the government has an obligation to release funds to the GETFund to provide the projects for the schools.
Beneficiaries of Ghana government scholarships are also complaining because the GETFund has not provided the grant to the Scholarship Secretariat to support gifted but needy students locally and abroad.
Metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives in the Western Region are bemoaning the delays in the completion of GETFund-funded projects scattered all over the region, thereby denying children access to education.
The Daily Graphic calls on the government to take the necessary steps to honour its obligation to the GETFund to enable it carry out its mandate to the people, especially the teeming youth in search of quality education.
Daily Graphic? Thursday, 16 January 2014
