The Wa Municipal Chairperson of the Ghana National Association of Private Schools (GNAPS), Mumuni Sulemana, has called on state regulatory institutions to adopt a partnership approach when dealing with private schools, warning that a pattern of threats and intimidation is undermining operators who are otherwise willing to comply with the law.
Speaking at the climax of a week-long GNAPS celebration in Wa on Saturday, March 28, 2026, Sulemana said private school proprietors in the Upper West Region and beyond were increasingly being targeted by multiple agencies in ways that created operational anxiety rather than promoting compliance.
“It is worrying that some state institutions appear to see private schools as easy targets. Today it is EPA; another time, it is NACIA; another time, it is NPRA. The approach often involves threats and intimidation rather than engagement,” he said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Accreditation and Inspectorate of Schools (NACIA) and the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA).
Sulemana acknowledged that private schools had a legal obligation to meet regulatory requirements, but said many proprietors, particularly in regions where some agencies were newly established, lacked adequate orientation on what those requirements were or how to meet them. He called for structured sensitisation periods before enforcement actions were pursued, arguing that operators needed time to adjust to new rules before facing sanctions.
He warned that continued clampdowns, including threats to revoke licences or shut down schools, risked collapsing emerging institutions and aggravating unemployment, with particular consequences for young women who he said made up a large share of the private school workforce. He cited figures suggesting Ghana had over 31,000 private schools employing more than 300,000 people, underscoring what he described as the sector’s critical role in national development. GNAPS’s own data indicates private schools account for 49 percent of all education establishments and 33 percent of total pre-tertiary enrolments in the country.
The association used the occasion to appeal directly to President John Dramani Mahama to intervene and direct regulatory bodies to pursue a more collaborative engagement model with private school operators. Sulemana framed the request within the government’s declared resetting agenda, arguing that the vision of collective national rebuilding was inconsistent with an adversarial regulatory posture toward a sector that was helping fill gaps in public education infrastructure.
