Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on education sector in Ghana: Learner challenges and mitigations

Abstract

In Ghana and the rest of the world, Covid-19 has negatively impacted economic growth with the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized households who depend on informal employment and businesses to fend for their children feeling the great impact. The pandemic has severely compromised their ability to finance school-related expenditures such as school kits, meals, and learning materials. With the adoption of remote teaching by the Government to facilitate distance learning and online education delivered through the internet, television, and radios, students from poor backgrounds face a great challenge as they can't access these mediums of learning and this leads to inequality in access and quality of education. Hence, it is necessary to look through these challenges to ensure there is continuous access to the provision of quality, inclusive and equitable education during and after the pandemic. Effective application of the suggested interventions by stakeholders and education managers will ensure uninterrupted learning in educational institutions in the future. This is the main idea to be tackled in this article. Since this is a theoretical review, it will depend on a review of secondary data material to examine and discuss the challenges and mitigations for COVID-19 in the Ghanaian education sector, in line with the learners. The theoretical review is guided by the Classical Liberal Theory of Equal Opportunities advocated by Sherman and Wood and the theory of justice and fairness advanced by Rawls John.