A Shift in Mindset for Ghana’s Education System
As Ghana embarks on a significant curriculum review, Professor Kwame Akyeampong emphasizes the need for a change in perspective. He advocates for moving away from borrowed solutions and instead embracing the rich wisdom found within our classrooms, cultures, and communities.
Beyond the ‘Crisis’ Narrative
The term “learning crisis” has become so commonly used in Africa that it risks losing its significance. However, as highlighted in his recent book, Reconceptualising the Learning Crisis in Africa: Multi-dimensional Pedagogies of Accelerated Learning Programmes (co-authored with Dr. Sean Higgins), the real issue is not that African children cannot learn, but rather that our schooling systems often neglect their cultural identities and the ways they learn best.
Across the continent, internationally imposed agendas have led to education reforms that focus narrowly on test scores in literacy and numeracy. While these outcomes are important, they only tell part of the story. Effective learning also involves belonging, identity, and agency—qualities that thrive when education systems value children’s languages, cultures, and experiences.
Ghana’s Success Story
Ghana has demonstrated what is possible when education begins with what children know and value. The Complementary Basic Education (CBE) program has quietly transformed the learning journeys of over 200,000 out-of-school children in rural Ghana. This program provides a second chance for children aged 8–14 to return to formal education through accelerated learning methods rooted in their home languages and community knowledge.
These classes, often held in simple community spaces, succeed not because of more textbooks or technology, but because they connect what children already know to what they are yet to learn. Teachers, many from the same communities, use stories, songs, and practical activities to build confidence and competence. The result is that children learn faster, retain more, and rediscover the joy of learning.
As Ghana reviews its basic education curriculum, with renewed focus on national values and identity as emphasized by the Minister for Education, there are powerful lessons to be drawn from the CBE program. It shows that when education starts with what children know and value, it can lead to meaningful transformation.
Restoring Dignity and Agency
Across Africa, many reforms still treat teachers as passive deliverers of scripted lessons and pupils as blank slates. However, Accelerated Learning Programmes (ALPs) in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Liberia offer a different vision—one where dignity and agency are central. In these classrooms, teachers are trusted to innovate, drawing on community wisdom, local stories, and play-based methods to make learning meaningful.
Children who once dropped out begin to see themselves not as failures but as capable learners. The lesson for Ghana is clear: when teaching honors children’s realities, both teachers and pupils thrive.
Language: The Bridge to Belonging
African languages are often dismissed as “preparation” for English, French, or other ex-colonial languages. However, decades of evidence show the power of learning in one’s home language. Children who do so achieve better literacy and numeracy skills, higher motivation, and greater self-esteem.
Yet millions of African children still start school in a language they do not understand. When they cannot follow lessons, they are excluded from learning itself. Conversely, when teachers use children’s home languages, the classroom becomes a space of recognition and participation.
As one Ghanaian linguist noted:
“A child needs to learn from known to unknown… from the mother tongue to understand the principles, concepts and values – to use that as a basis to know.”
Despite this, African languages are still often seen as a stepping stone to other languages, which impoverishes education. The myths that there are too many languages, that African tongues cannot express complex ideas, or that English immersion guarantees fluency have been repeatedly disproven.
The deeper obstacle, as Pai Obanya warned, is fear: fear that valuing our languages might weaken national unity or global competitiveness. The opposite is true. When children hear and use their own languages in school, comprehension rises, participation increases, and self-worth grows. Language becomes a bridge to belonging—and belonging is the soil in which learning takes root.
It is therefore encouraging that Vice-President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, a longtime advocate for mother tongue instruction, has recently called for a more robust, consistent, and well-implemented approach to using local languages in the early grades. Her message is timely: understanding must come before fluency, and identity must anchor instruction.
Empowering Teachers, Engaging Communities
If children are to learn with understanding, teachers must teach with creativity. But global ‘quick fixes’ that hand them rigid lesson scripts risk deskilling Ghana’s educators and undermining the relational heart of African teaching and the pedagogical culture of our classrooms.
CBE shows us another way, where teachers act as co-creators of pedagogy, adapting materials to local contexts. Parents and elders contribute folk tales, proverbs, and examples from farming or fishing that make the curriculum come alive. Learning thus becomes a shared community enterprise, not a top-down delivery system.
Towards a Re-envisioned Curriculum
Ghana’s basic education curriculum review offers a unique opportunity to rethink not only what children learn but how they learn. A genuinely African curriculum must celebrate our ways of knowing—storytelling, singing, questioning, collaboration—rather than treating them as peripheral.
Our research shows that when content reflects African social values of community and solidarity (Ubuntu), learners engage more deeply. Afrocentric play-based activities, oral narratives, and moral lessons are not relics of the past; they are the living technologies of learning.
To embed these insights, policymakers must invest in:
- Making mother-tongue instruction a cornerstone of education reform for the early grades, without compromise, and ensuring a gradual, bilingual transition backed with comprehensive linguistic mapping;
- Teacher development that builds reflective practice and bilingual pedagogies;
- Curricular materials grounded in local realities; and
- Structures for community participation that make schooling a collective endeavor and responsibility.
From Crisis to Possibility
The “learning crisis” is not located in Ghanaian children, teachers, or languages. It lies in our failure to recognize and value the wealth of knowledge already present in our communities. Accelerated Learning Programmes like CBE prove that when pedagogy is grounded in dignity, agency, and belonging, every child can learn and learn well.
As Ghana reimagines its curriculum and strengthens its language of instruction policy, it stands at a crossroads. We can continue importing models that overlook our realities, or we can build a system that begins with who we are, our stories, our languages, our creativity.
Education’s purpose is not only to prepare workers for the global economy, but to nurture citizens who can transform their communities. If we start from that premise, the narrative of “crisis” will give way to one of confidence, capability, and collective renewal—a truly worthy education for Ghana’s children.
