World Bank Global Disability Advisor visits Ghana

Ms Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, Global Disability Adviser, World Bank Group, says the bank is committed to ensuring that funding for education is disability-inclusive.

“I have an interest in disability education because the Bank has supported work in Ghana around inclusive education,” she said.

Ms McClain-Nhlapo said this when she visited the Demonstration School for the Deaf in Mampong-Akuapem in the Eastern Region.

“My visit to the school was to be sure that we understood the lived reality of the people that we were supporting.

“It’s been very enlightening to meet with the staff and students of the school and see how best we can continue to support inclusive education in Ghana,” she said.

Ms McClain-Nhlapo said the Ghana sign language dictionaries were translated with funding from the World Bank into videos that would make them more accessible.

She commended the school for putting in place a Hearing and Speech Diagnostic Assessment Centre and said the structure was at a basic level, and they needed modern facilities to do proper screening for placement of learners with disabilities.

The Global Disability Adviser tasked the school with undertaking a comprehensive budget for the facilities and channelled them to the Ministry of Education for the necessary action.

Mr Setumte Ametewee, Principal, Demonstration School for the Deaf, said the school was established in 1967 and currently has a total population of 531 students, both boarders and day, from kindergarten to Senior High and Technical level.

He commended the government for absorbing all special schools into the Ghana Accountability and Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP).
GALOP is a project funded by the World Bank, the Global Partnership for Education, and the Education Outcomes Fund.

The project objective is to improve the quality of education in low-performing basic education schools and strengthen education sector equity and accountability in Ghana.

Under the GALOP initiative, teachers were trained in differentiated learning and targeted instruction, which included teaching children reading and numeracy skills and the preparation of teacher-learning materials.

The Principal of the School described the GALOP initiative as useful because it had boosted the performance of the students, culminating in a pass rate of 77 per cent during the 2023 Basic Education Certificate Examination.

He appealed for more funding for special schools across the country due to their peculiar situation to aid effective teaching and learning.