Across Africa people face the challenge of securing land tenure. Ghana is just one example of a country where land rights are governed by legal pluralism, whereby customary, statutory and religious laws overlap in governing a single territory.
The IDP Rising Schools Program has proven that through carefully tailored loan products accompanied by specialized training in financial literacy and school management, very poor private schools in Ghana are bankable. Now, the IDP Foundation, Inc. has turned its attention to improving the quality of teaching in these low-cost private schools, whose teachers are largely untrained and have little access to professional development opportunities.
At the IDP Foundation, we are always looking for ways to maximize our impact. We work hard to find highly effective, but underfunded programs that address clear needs in education and healthcare – and if we can’t find the right program…well, we build it ourselves! This is the approach we took when we created the IDP Rising Schools Program several years ago.
Recently the head of the Plan EU office in Brussels, Alexandra Mackaroff, wrote a short piece for Devex on gender equality and put forth some recommendations for the European Union on ways to take action and combat growing inequality in developing nations.
Every year, several hundred thousand Junior High School students take the Basic Education Certificate Examination in Ghana. This highly competitive exam largely determines their educational future, as it selects the students who qualify to attend Senior High School, as well as decide which school they will attend. With such high stakes, the IDP Rising Schools Program is thrilled to highlight two schools that did particularly well on the exam.