Right Honourable Speaker,
Your Excellency, the Vice President,
Your Ladyship, the Chief Justice,
Honourable Members of Parliament,
Since the start of the Fourth Republic, every President, in fulfillment of Article 67 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, has stood before this august house each year to address the state of our nation. It is my privilege, as President, to also stand before you today to present a message on the state of the nation.
I am pleased to be addressing the full house today, and I wish to thank all my parliamentary colleagues for the cooperation you have continually extended to me since I was sworn in as President. As a former Member of Parliament for twelve (12) years, I am always filled with a sense of nostalgia anytime I step onto the grounds of Parliament.
Mr. Speaker, we find ourselves at a unique place in history. Our beloved Ghana is a nation in transition. We are on the cusp of many exciting new opportunities. We are on the verge of fulfilling the promises our forefathers and foremothers made to us, and to the world, about the destiny of our country and the determination of our people.
We are in the midst of change. And change can often feel uncomfortable, especially as it pulls us away from the systems and practices with which we have become familiar, but are no longer serving our needs efficiently. Without change, Mr. Speaker, Ghana cannot grow. Change is what will propel us forward, as a nation, to all that lies ahead.
And these new opportunities will enable us to transform ourselves from a lower middle-income, import-dependent, developing country to a proud and robust, self-sufficient middle-income nation.
Mr. Speaker, we have been here before, as a nation. We have been in transition, pushing our way past doubt, and past darkness, to find the dawn of a new day. Ghana was created through change, a movement of the people in support of their collective vision.
And then Ghana went on to influence change on the African continent and in effect, the course of the world.
Mr. Speaker, last year in my first State of the Nation Address, I defined the four basic pillars around which my approach to governance and socio-economic transformation would revolve. They are: Putting People First; Building a Strong and Resilient Economy; Expanding Infrastructure for Growth; and, Maintaining Transparent and Accountable Governance.
Today, as I talk about where we are as a nation, I also want to talk about who we are as a nation. I want to talk about the richness and diversity of our talent and innovation. I want to talk about the strength of our determination as a people. It is a determination that has always guided us toward victory in all of our endeavours.
We are a nation of 24 million. That’s people not products. 24 million human lives, each one deserving access to the basic necessities of life; each one possessing unique ideas and skill sets to make Ghana better; each one holding more value to this country in its existence and potential than any other natural resource we have.
Mr. Speaker, this is why my government’s first priority is, and will continue to be, our people. At the core of every decision we make and every policy we implement is the understanding that it will have a direct and positive impact in the day-to-day lives of average Ghanaian citizens.
PILLAR I: PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST
a. Gender, Children and Social Protection
At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, (Switzerland), a prominent item on the agenda was the topic of “inequality.” Various development and social justice organizations cited it as one of this decade’s top global risks. Inequality among nations, as well as inequality within nations, has become a major flashpoint for social tension.
Mr. Speaker, wealth disparity is of great concern to my government. It is a threat to our stability as a nation and to our unity as a people. We are aiming to bridge the gap between the richest and poorest of our people. In the next two months, here in Accra, we will host a major international conference focusing on the theme of growing inequality in the world.
We are proud to be hosting this conference, and we are eager to share our experiences with the rest of the world, and also gain insight from the other conference participants and the international community-at-large.
Mr. Speaker, the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection is a major instrument in our effort to create an all-inclusive society in which the weak and disadvantaged also have a stake in our nation’s progress. The Ministry’s primary mandate is to promote the welfare and protection of children, and to empower the vulnerable, the excluded, the aged, and persons living with disability, and to ensure true gender equality.
A lot of this Ministry’s work involves advocacy and, in this regard, the Ministry has actively been involved in the drafting of the Affirmative Action Bill and the Intestate Succession and Property Rights of Spouses Bills. The Ministry also initiated the process for the validation of the Domestic Workers Regulation. These are pieces of legislations that are key to protecting the rights of our women and other vulnerable groups in our society.
The Ministry’s flagship programme, however, is the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, otherwise known as LEAP. Mr. Speaker, through this programme, the Ministry has made cash grants to 74,000 of the poorest households in our country. This means that now, the poorest 74,000 families in Ghana will be able to afford food, clothing and the cost of basic transportation. Now, these families will have access to healthcare and education; now, these families can even invest in some small income-generating activity.
This year, the Ministry, with the support of Government, plans to increase the beneficiary families of LEAP to 100,000. In 2015 that number will increase to 150,000. Currently the Ministry is implementing an electronic platform to deliver the grants to the beneficiaries using mobile phones. Mobile devices are being distributed to the beneficiary families to enable them receive their transfers. With those mobile devices many households would also, for the first time, be able to connect to the national communication network.
The LEAP programme is not intended to be a source of long-term support to the same set of families. The purpose of these cash grants is to empower the poor and the vulnerable. It is to create opportunities in order to give them a way out of poverty. The programme ensures that the most impoverished among us can live in dignity. It offers them hope in their future possibilities, and a chance to participate in the collective future of our nation.
Mr. Speaker, this Ministry is especially vigilant when it comes to the rights and protection of our children. The Ministry, together with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit [DOVVSU] has led an awareness campaign against child marriage. As a result of this campaign, they have successfully extricated numerous children forced into marriage and returned them to their families and studies.
The Ministry has also provided the equipment and taken tool kits to twenty-five (25) institutions across the nation to facilitate the technical and vocational training of young people.
Finally, the Ministry for Gender, Children and Social Protection, convened a team of doctors to perform the necessary surgeries on women with obstetric fistula in the Upper East, Upper West, Volta and Central regions. In addition to offering these women relief from the pain and discomfort of this childbirth injury, these procedures have restored their dignity and sense of self-worth.
Mr. Speaker, through our social intervention programmes we must create safety nets that protect the poor and vulnerable. We must share the fruits of our growth equitably in order that we leave no one behind. This is the way we can guarantee that all our citizens are committed and have a stake in the survival and advancement of our nation.
b. Health
Mr. Speaker, it is this government’s vision to extend quality health care to all our people irrespective of one’s status in society or geographical location. This involves the construction of new facilities and the training of health personnel.
Healthy people make a healthy nation. All around the world it is recognised that the costs and consequences of illness far outweigh the cost of making quality healthcare accessible and affordable to all.
Mr. Speaker, to this end, Government is pursuing the vision of bringing healthcare to the doorsteps of our people, in even the remotest of locations. We have been engaged in an aggressive rollout of Community Health Improvement Compounds [CHPS]. The compounds are staffed with trained nurses, midwives, and other auxiliary health personnel. They are located in rural and peri-urban communities, and they provide basic healthcare services including antenatal care to pregnant women.
These compounds have greatly increased access to healthcare, especially in deprived communities. They have cut down the distance our citizens have to travel to access healthcare. The CHPS compounds are also playing a prominent role in Ghana’s steadily decreasing maternal mortality numbers. By 2016, we aim to construct an additional 1600 new CHPS compounds across the country.
To support this wonderful campaign, my colleagues and I in the Executive branch of Government have taken a voluntary ten percent (10%) cut in salaries. These contributions will be used to construct more CHPS Compounds so that we can save the lives of more women during childbirth.
Mr. Speaker, our policy is to provide every district with a modern health facility. The newly constructed Tarkwa Hospital has been equipped and is now open for use. This has improved the quality of health for people in that catchment area. Work is ongoing on twelve (12) new district hospitals, including Dodowa, Sekondi, Fomena and Garu-Tempane, while financing for an extra nine (9) are being concluded.
Mr. Speaker, work is ongoing on a new teaching hospital for the University of Ghana. When completed, this new hospital will make quality tertiary healthcare readily available. It will also ease the pressure on the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. Work is ongoing to upgrade the Ridge Hospital into a full-fledged regional hospital to serve the Greater Accra Region.
Work on the Upper West Regional Hospital in Wa is progressing steadily. Just a few weeks ago I cut the sod for the start of Phase II of the upgrading and expansion of the Tamale Teaching Hospital. This upgrading has made the Tamale Teaching Hospital a critical provider of tertiary care in the northern sector.
This development also means that it is now possible for medical students from the University for Development Studies to perform their clinicals at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, instead of moving to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi to complete their studies.
Mr. Speaker in this age of modern medicine, in order to best serve patients, our healthcare facilities must maintain equipment that is state of the art and in good working order. Under the National Medical Equipment Replacement Programme, modern equipment has been supplied to forty (40) district hospitals.
Other beneficiary hospitals are the Ridge, Tema General, 37 Military, the Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital, as well as Maamobi General Hospital. There were three teaching hospitals that also benefitted- Tamale, Komfo Anokye, and Korle Bu.
Mr. Speaker, Korle-Bu, Ghana’s premier teaching hospital, benefitted from equipment supplies and rehabilitation worth 276 million Ghana Cedis. This expenditure covered the paediatrics theatre, which had been closed for more than 8 years. Children are now able to have their surgeries in a beautifully renovated theatre with first class equipment. Additional facilities covered by the expenditure were the neonatal, intensive care and baby units; the mammography centre, as well as the laundry and kitchen.
We are currently engaged in the expansion of health training facilities. More Nursing and Midwifery Training and Medical Assistants Training institutions are being opened. This means that more skilled personnel are being graduated to serve in the health sector. So far, more than 3,000 medical personnel have been trained. These include, medical assistants, midwives, public and community health nurses.
The net result of this additional access to and availability of health personnel is reflected in the increasing life expectancy ratio in Ghana, which currently stands at about 65 years – among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another positive result of this is, the drop in institutional neonatal mortality from 5.8 per 1000 live births in 2012 to 2.3 per 1000 today. The average neonatal maternal mortality is also decreasing steadily. These are not just numbers; they represent human lives. These improvements mean that more babies are surviving childbirth and more mothers’ lives are being saved.
Mr. Speaker, when it comes to saving lives, Ghana has been hugely successful in its efforts in the area of HIV and AIDS. Our prevalence rate for HIV and AIDS continues to decline and currently stands at 1.37%. The Ghana AIDS Commission continues to work towards implementation of our 5-year strategic plan. The plan envisions a 50% reduction in new infections by 2015, virtual elimination of mother-to-child transmission and the placement of more infected persons on antiretroviral therapies. We will mobilise funding for a massive scaling up of our antiretroviral therapy programmes.
At the invitation of UNAIDS I attended the Lancet Commission Conference of HIV and AIDS in London (recently). At the conference, I championed the cause of building local capacity in the African Pharmaceutical industry for the production of antiretroviral therapies.
Mr. Speaker, I am happy to announce that we are on track to exceed the target of a 50% reduction in new infections by 2015. We are also leading the way in Sub-Saharan Africa with over 76% reduction in new HIV infections among children.
Despite those successes, Mr. Speaker, there are key populations in which HIV infections remain much higher than the national average. Among sex workers the infection rate is 11.3%. It has dropped significantly from 25% in 2009, but it still remains well above our target, as does the infection rate among men who have sex with men, which currently stands at 17.5%.
Mr. Speaker, education has proven to be the most effective tool in the battle against the spread of HIV/AIDS. The awareness that is gained through education is what prompts people to alter or stop engaging in behaviour and practices that place them at greater risk of infection. We will continue our public awareness campaigns, specifically ones targeting those populations at greatest risk.
c. Education
When it comes to education, Mr. Speaker, government’s top areas of focus are quality, access, and affordability. There was a time when our public school system was on track and on par with the private schools here in Ghana, and anywhere else in the world. Where education is concerned, we have a history of being quite visionary.
When the Prince of Wales College, which later became Achimota, was established in 1924 as a co-educational facility, gender equality in education was far from the norm. In fact, most women the world over did not even have the right to vote or own property. But in Ghana, girls and young women were being educated alongside their male counterparts. And, rightfully, with that education came the expectation of comparable careers.
When the commission on higher education in the British colonies recommended that a single university be established in British West Africa and chose Ibadan, Nigeria as the location of that university, we Ghanaians challenged their decision. We understood the value of education. We knew what the presence of an institution of higher learning would mean to our people, especially to the future generations.
In the end our protest was successful and that university which was established in 1948 as an affiliate of the University of London is now none other than our esteemed University of Ghana.
Mr. Speaker, we must make education a priority again. The students of this nation deserve to have the confidence that comes from knowing that the education they are receiving will adequately prepare them to navigate this competitive global workplace. If our students are left behind, then we as a nation will also be left behind.
To this end, Government has been working to improve the quality of education, especially at the basic level. The main problems affecting this level are a lack of teachers, a lack of teaching and learning materials, and poor school infrastructure especially, in the rural areas; and, also, community apathy in the management of schools.
We are actively engaged in the process of building new school blocks to replace schools in sub-standard structures. In 1,900 communities, mostly rural, this has improved the environment in which children learn and enabled classes to be held all year round.
In urban schools, these additional facilities have enabled Government to progressively eliminate the shift system that had children attending school in turns. Science resource centres have also been rehabilitated across the country to facilitate the learning of science and mathematics.
Mr. Speaker, the availability of teachers has been a major challenge. Because of constraints of paying teacher trainee allowances, Government previously imposed quotas on admissions into colleges of education. Annual admission to these colleges was therefore restricted.
With the recent decision to transfer teacher trainees onto the Students Loan Trust, it has made it possible to increase the number of trainees in the colleges of education from the previous 9000 to 15000. This would improve the supply of teachers and open up the opportunity to many young people who want to take up teaching as a profession.
Unfortunately, it has become apparent that the training of these professionals does not always translate into an availability of teachers in certain areas. Mr. Speaker, I am concerned, and we all must be concerned, about the findings from a national staff rationalization exercise just completed by the Ministry of Education. It is clear that we need to do better with the deployment of our teachers.
The current situation is that in many regions there is an excess of teachers in urban and peri-urban areas, but in the rural and other deprived communities, teachers are often in short supply. We cannot accept this educational divide between our urban and rural communities.
So, Mr. Speaker, I am calling for nationwide support for the Education Ministry and the Ghana Education Service as they take the necessary actions to implement a programme aimed at an immediate and comprehensive redeployment and redistribution of teachers.
It is very important that all Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives, as well as MPs and community leaders take an active part in these efforts to address issues of education at the district and community levels. Together, we can and we must improve school management, performance and accountability across our nation.
Mr. Speaker, the lack of instructional and learning materials is also being addressed through the supply of textbooks and exercise books to children in public schools across the country. Through this programme, more than 12 million books have been distributed to basic schoolchildren in the country, thus equipping them with the core tools they require for their education.
While Ghana has been successful in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on universal primary education, there still remain pockets where school enrolment is low. To address this, Government introduced the Complementary Basic Education programme. This programme has facilitated teaching and learning for 25,000 out-of-school children.
Classes under this programme are ongoing in the Upper East, Upper West. Northern and Brong Ahafo Regions. Now, there are 25,000 children whose choices will not be limited by illiteracy; 25,000 children who can go on to become productive contributors to this society in ways they might never before have even imagined.
Mr. Speaker, at the secondary level, access continues to be a major problem. Existing secondary schools have a capacity to absorb only 60% of the students who qualify from Junior High School. Because of the high demand for secondary education, existing schools have been compelled to admit much higher than they were designed to accommodate. This has led to circumstances in which there are some schools with as many as 3000 students. This is significantly higher than the prescribed average of 1500.
Government’s programme to construct 200 new community day secondary schools is on track. Architectural drawings, designs and quantities have been completed, sites for the schools have been selected, and the procurement process for the first batch of schools is currently ongoing.
The start of construction works for these schools was held back in 2013 because of the detailed activities that went into the preparatory process. We have made good progress on this project and I invite all of you honourable members of this august house to join me to break ground for the commencement of construction of the first 50 schools next month, precisely on the 3rd of March.
Mr. Speaker, the most expensive segment of our education system is the second cycle. We promised to rationalize fees in the secondary schools in order to reduce the burden on parents. The Ministry of Education, after extensive stakeholder consultations, advertised a uniform list of approved fees for second cycle schools. Parents are being advised to report any head of school that charges fees outside of those on the schedule published by the Ministry.
Further to this, the Ministry, following consultations with stakeholders, has prepared a report on the road map for a progressive introduction of free secondary education in Ghana as required under the 1992 Constitution. This road map would be presented to Cabinet for approval and subsequent implementation. Under the guidance of this proposed road map, we can anticipate that fees for day students will be abolished at an estimated cost of GHC71 million in the 2015/2016 academic year. Other reliefs in respect of boarding student would be announced when the road map is published.
Mr. Speaker, access to tertiary education continues to expand with the increase in admission into public universities and the participation of accredited private institutions in providing. While this has provided opportunity for many to gain a university education, we must be mindful both of the quality of education provided and also the disciplines offered in our institutions of higher learning. Some universities may appear interested in only expanding enrolment to attract greater revenue and therefore waive the strict entry qualifications required for study in university.
Additionally many universities and tertiary institutions go for the softer course options and churn out graduates in business and the humanities at the expense of science, technology and allied courses which are increasingly in demand in an economy in transition from lower middle income to middle income status.
This is partly responsible for the increasing graduate unemployment level with which we are currently plagued. I have asked the Ministers of Education and Employment and Labour Relations to sponsor a joint survey of the professional and skills sets in demand in the Ghanaian labour market. Such a survey will provide students guidance in selecting courses in areas where their opportunities for employment are brighter and also provide our universities with information to adjust curricula and admissions to align with the demands of the job market.
Mr. Speaker, I am happy to report to this august house today that, as stated in our 2012 NDC manifesto and indicated in my 2013 State of the Nation Address, the establishment of the first public university in the Eastern Region is becoming a reality.
The Professor Benning-Amoako-Nuamah Committee has completed work on the nature, specialization, proposed academic mandate and specific location for this university. A draft bill for the establishment of this new university in the Eastern Region is also ready and will soon be presented to the House for consideration.
Mr. Speaker, it also pleases me to report that progress is being made with the two latest public universities that were set up in the last term of the NDC Government. The University of Health and Allied Sciences in the Volta Region has increased its intake from 155 students at its inception three years ago to 535.
Additionally, the University of Energy and Natural Resources in the Brong Ahafo Region has also grown from 150 founding students to 716 current students.
Plans are also afoot for the establishment of their satellite campuses in Hohoe Dorma Ahenkro, and Nsoatre. Honourable members will also observe in the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) Formula, to be presented to the house soon, that we have proposed to scale-up financial support to these new universities.
Mr. Speaker, before the end of this year, I will announce the formal process to convert ten of our polytechnics into Technical Universities. The Technical Committee set up by the Ministry of Education has completed its work and various stakeholder consultations are currently taking place, leading to the final conversion.
I must commend the technical committee for their impressive output and, Mr. Speaker, I welcome the excitement this policy intervention has generated in the technical and vocational education fraternity.
Ghanaians can remain assured that government will continue in our efforts to rebrand technical and vocational education and give it the important attention and support it deserves in the development of our nation. This move is particularly important at this critical moment of our development when we are embarking on the transformation of the structure of our economic fundamentals.
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