A University of Professional Studies, Accra lecturer has weighed in on the impasse over Free Senior High School (Free SHS) feeding funding, arguing that the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) has fundamentally misunderstood its own institutional role.
Dr James Kwabena Bomfeh Jnr, speaking on the AM Show on Joy News, said the current tensions stem directly from a failure by GETFund and its administrator to distinguish between financing and implementation. “GETFund as an institution and its administrator must understand that it is not an implementing agency. What it does is to finance,” he said.
According to Dr Bomfeh, GETFund’s mandate is to channel resources to agencies under the Ministry of Education that carry out education-related activities, not to take on direct operational roles. “They are supposed to finance continually, consistently, what would make education better,” he stated.
He also raised concerns about the inconsistency with which GETFund has been receiving its own allocations, warning that funding interruptions compound the sector’s difficulties. “When GETFund is not getting its allocations… we complain about it because they are supposed to finance education,” he noted.
The dispute came to a head after a high-level meeting convened by Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu to resolve the feeding crisis ended without resolution, following the GETFund administrator’s open refusal to comply with a ministerial directive during the session.
The 2026 budget allocated GH¢4.2 billion from GETFund, roughly 42 percent of the fund’s total resources, toward Free SHS operational costs, including feeding and day-to-day school expenses, a concentration that education observers have warned could stall infrastructure development at other levels of the system.
Dr Bomfeh maintained that resolving the current impasse requires all parties to operate within their defined mandates, warning that institutional overreach or role confusion will continue to produce operational breakdowns across the education sector.
