50,000 tertiary students to be awarded government scholarships in 2020/21 academic year

The Ghana Scholarships Secretariat will award about 50,000 tertiary students with government scholarships in the 2020/21 academic year.

To this end, government has allocated about 80 million Ghana Cedis to cater for the tertiary education of prospective applicants.

The significant increase is in line with management of the scholarship scheme’s restructuring process to expand access for brilliant but needy students.

This was disclosed by the Registrar for Scholarships at the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat, Kingsley Agyemang at a workshop on validation processes for scholarship applicants in Ho.

Participants include IT professionals and accountants from the 23 tertiary institutions in the Volta Region.

Mr Agyemang said, in line with President Akufo Addo’s directive, the Secretariat has initiated processes aimed at increasing access and ensuring transparency in its scholarship awards.

The initiative includes digitalization of the award processes and implementation of the scheme in a decentralized manner to ensure that beneficiaries are qualified applicants.

Mr Agyemang said the new decentralized system is robust and will check data integrity of applicants to ensure that they are qualified. He noted that for the first time, there will be a significant increase in scholarship awards for beneficiaries in the 2020/21 academic year.

“In 2017 we awarded one thousand 700 students, in 2018 we awarded 9,500 students and about 29000 beneficiaries in 2019.

This year we intend to award 45 to 50,000 students.

If you look at the percentage jump it’s been very progressive.

In terms of budget we have set aside 80 million Ghana cedis to take care of this particular activity of government”, Mr Agyemang said.

He urged school authorities to support the Secretariat in the validation processes of applicants to ensure that qualified students are awarded with scholarships.

Story filed by: Elorm Yao Aryee