The underlying ambition of fee-free education is to increase school access. This study reflects on decentralisation in the decision-making process and implementation of fee-free policies. We compare two policies at the high school level in Ghana to evaluate the differences and commonalities in how they responded to school access. We used…

Financial barriers to education such as the payment of school fees have long been identified as a key driver of the perennially high out-of-school rates in developing countries. Accordingly, Ghana implemented the education capitation grant (CG) policy in 2005 as part of efforts to universalise access to primary education. At its core, the policy…

Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are expanding access to high school education, which is a perpetuation of the previous focus on basic education. This study applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using data from seven countries from 2010 to 2020 to examine the potential conditions of fee-free policies at the high school level. Five…

Ghana is one of the few countries with prior cost-sharing funding approaches to upper secondary education to have rolled out a completely free upper secondary education policy. Whilst the empirical foundation of the emerging body of studies on the policy includes policy makers, implementers and a reliance on policy documents, the perspectives of…

This study aims to investigate the impact of women empowerment and free senior high school on secondary school enrolment in Ghana. The Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) estimation method, which examines both short- and long-term effects, was utilized to analyze data obtained from the World Bank database and the ILO database covering the…

Government implemented education access policies occupy a prominent place in the discourse on access to education. Education access issues have, thus, been examined almost exclusively from macro-level structural perspective. The micro-politics that take place behind the scenes after structural access issues have been resolved is minimally…

To satisfy the global commitment of promoting 'Education for All', Ghana, a sub-Saharan African country developed an inclusive education policy to define the government's strategic path for the education of children and youth with special education needs. Years after making this commitment, research evidence has revealed significant challenges…

While many scholars recognize and criticize the politicization of education policies, scholarly attention to the strategies politicians utilize to politicize educational policy discourses remains limited. Focusing on the officials of Ghana's two major political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as…

This paper investigates how Dutch education professionals and Ghanaian migrant youth frame the impact of young people's geographical mobility on education. The paper is based on a discourse analysis of policy documentation, semi-structured interviews with education professionals and 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with 30 young…

Promoting female learning otherwise known as Girl Child Education continues to engage the attention of policy makers and practitioners in education and development generally; a situation greatly shaped by the myriad of obstacles militating against girl child education. In the current study, we probed the influence of CAMFED's girl child education…

Early childhood education (ECE) in Ghana has grown from a traditional approach to a more formalised and modernised system of care and education services for young children. As a valued practice, ECE reflects a distributive, regulatory or redistributive policy. The paper analyses Ghana's ECE policy implementation using McDonnell and Elmore's…

In the 2017/2018 academic year, the government of Ghana, through the Ministry of Education, began an educational reform policy codenamed the "Free Senior High School" (FSHS) policy to fully absorb the cost, increase enrolment, and improve the quality of education for all public senior high schools in Ghana. To accommodate more students…

This study looked at assessment for learning as a criterion for promoting inclusiveness and equitable access to educational opportunities in Ghana. It compared assessment for learning and assessment of learning and recommended measures to evaluate students' performance to allow for equitable access and progression in education. The study found the…

Secondary schools in Ghana are mainly classified as day or day/boarding, single sex or mixed, stratified into resourced (elite) or less resourced whilst academic delivery is via academic or technical-vocational programmes. This categorization has also bred performing and underperforming inequities suggesting the absence of equal access to quality…

Social protection interventions have been used as a poverty reduction strategy in many countries. Free Basic Education is one of the social protection interventions implemented in most developing countries. This review assessed the outcome of the implementation of Free Basic Education in Africa, using Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, and Malawi as a test…