The Ministry of Education has taken delivery of more than 3.7million English teaching and learning textbooks from the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) for distribution to schools across the country.
The books form part of the Transition to English (T2E) programme of the USAID Partnership for Education Learning Activity.
In all about 11,000 schools outside the T2E programme are to benefit from the distribution of the books, printed by the Buck Press Limited.
At a brief ceremony in Accra yesterday to hand over the books to the Ministry, the United States of America, Ambassador to Ghana, Ms Virginia Palmer said over 15million books had been supplied under the programme to schools across the country.
She said the US government remained positive and committed to supporting the government of Ghana to improving early grade reading achievements in English and other official languages.
Ms Palmer noted that, the idea of the learning to read programme was critically important because no one can read to learn unless he or she learns to read first.
She said the delivery of the teaching materials was about $5million. However, the entire programme was valued at $96million.
The Ambassador explained that the materials were fully developed in Ghana by Ghanaian Writers and Designers and printed by Buck Press a local printing firm.
She commended Buck Press not just delivering on time, but also ensure quality of delivery which could be compared with work from anywhere in the world.
She said she was particularly happy that by so doing, employment was created for the local people.
The Minister of Education, Dr Yaw OseiAdutwum, on his part commended the Buck Press for demonstrating capacity and delivering quality job.
He said the quality of work undertaken justified the government’s decision to engage local printing companies to do the printing in Ghana and urged private individuals to also follow suit and print their books locally.
The Minister said the government remained committed to developing a seamless education from basic to tertiary in the country.
This, he said included removing all barriers from basic to tertiary to ensure that Ghanaians received the best of educational comparable to the rest of the world.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
