Education is critical for the right to exercise rights and, as a result, for the empowerment of women. Education allows girls and boys, men and women, to participate in social, economic, and political life, and it serves as the foundation for the advancement of a free democracy.
The project aimed to improve Ghana’s education delivery by increasing opportunities for rural children to enroll in school, contributing to the achievement of Education for All, and improving gender parity to close the educational achievement gap between male and female students.
The Wing School project helped Ghana achieve the goals of its Education Strategic Plan (ESP 2010-2020), which aims to provide equal educational opportunities for boys and girls. Despite the Ghana Education Service’s establishment of a girls’ education unit led by girls’ school teachers at the nationwide, regional, and district levels.
Girls still faced barriers to get basic education, which includes a high rate of teenage pregnancy, Long distances walking to the high school, migration to cities in southern Ghana in search of jobs and engagement in economic activities to supplement family income.
The primary project goals were met by establishing Wing Schools in hard-to-reach communities where there had previously been no schools, and doing so in a gender-sensitive manner. The project aimed to achieve gender parity by lowering socioeconomic and cultural barriers to girls’ education. This outcome was linked to two outputs: increasing community ownership of schools and ensuring equal representation of women and men in the school management committees.
The Wing School intervention’s main goals were to:
1. Ease enrolment in formal school by opening Wing Schools in hard-to-reach communities.
2. Ensure that Wing Schools provide quality education by recruiting community teachers who have been trained to adapt to the context of learners and apply learner-centered, gender-sensitive, and participatory approaches to teaching and learning.
3. Facilitate cross action to collectively achieve access to quality education by creating platforms for discussion and building the capacity of district planning authorities, as well as increasing the number of students enrolled.
Amidst major challenges such as a physical lack of schools, rampant adolescent pregnancy and child marriage, long distances to school, and disadvantaged, remote locations, the deprived rural communities targeted by this project valued girls’ education. As a result, girls’ school attendance is high, and they have a primary completion rate of more than 86 percent and literacy proficiency of nearly 80 percent. The fact that state agencies are working to integrate and mainstream both the Wing Schools and community teachers into the government school system demonstrates that the model is a good practise for girls’ schooling with strong environmental prospects that should be replicated in other parts of the globe.
