Education

Establish endowment funds in second cycle schools—Tetteh Tagoe

A Chartered Accountant, Mr Ebenezer Tetteh Tagoe, has advocated the establishment of endowment funds to cater for day-to-day simple maintenance challenges in second cycle institutions.

He explained that, endowment funds were perfect for taking care of modest academic needs such as student incentives, educational improvement aids that have high payoff in promoting academic excellence, library books, and subscription issues regarding IT resources.

“A GH₵200 initial problem in two years becomes GH₵ 2,000, tenfold increase, the need for endowment funds to address meager monetary problems facing second cycle institutions should be considered,” he lamented.

Mr Tagoe made suggestion yesterday at the 2nd Robert Thompson Orleans-Pobee Memorial lectures on the theme, “Sustaining vibrant second cycle institutions: role of stakeholders” in Accra.

It was organised by the Adisadel National Old Boys Association in honour of one of their illustrious sons of Adisadel College, Mr Robert Thompson Orleans-Pobee, who served as a former Headmaster of the school.

Mr Tagoe said, although, there were few endowment funds, most were not well organised as there were no active fundraising mechanisms to sustain the funds.

“There used to be annual workshops on endowment funds for academic institutions, but lack of interest by institutions has curtailed the workshops.

“Small amounts of money from growth-oriented endowment funds will go a long way towards providing and replenishing inexpensive but academically important laboratory materials and equipment,” he said.

Mr Tagoe said recent experience has shown that, without steadily available “small funds”, it would not be easy to maintain, let alone improve upon the level of academic and extracurricular excellence and leadership that Adisadel College had been associated with for more than a century.

“Generally, government-provided funds cover the heavy-duty items in payments of Staff Salaries and benefits, infrastructure as well as for other government-mandated institutional support.

 Fortunately, ADISCO has had endowment funds for quite some time, one based in Ghana and the other in the US.

The value of the fund per the audited accounts as at 31 December 2018 , he said was a modest GH₵500,000 while  the USA old students was aiming at a fund size of US$500,000,” he said.

BY BERNARD BENGHAN                                                                    

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