Despite positive progress in equity and access to basic education in Ghana, the education sector still faces large disparities. Especially children with disabilities are disadvantaged, as they have lower learning levels and are over-represented among children out of school and those not learning. Dropouts are high among girls, the poorest, and in rural areas, while completion rates are particularly low in the northern regions of Ghana. Girls continue to have lower attendance and retention, enhanced by school-related gender-based violence, together with gendered norms and value systems.

The inequities in the provision and delivery of accessible and quality public basic education especially in rural communities of Northern Ghana is in part due to lacking transparency and accountability in the education system. In these areas, citizens have weak capacities and are not well enough coordinated to demand accountability on their right to quality education from education authorities.

The need for a stronger involvement of civil society in public basic education to demand accountability and transparency is part of the CLEAR projects approach to achieve equitable access to quality basic education for children.

The strategic approach of the project is to strengthen the capacity of mobilised citizen groups to lead evidence generation using social accountability processes, engage state actors to enable interfaces between citizens and the government, strengthen collaborations with strategic CSO partners to embark on joint advocacy campaigns based on the generated evidence, intensify collaboration with the media to bring spotlight on the issues, and spark policy discourse.

By the end of the phase, the project is expected to have contributed to:

• Citizens in deprived communities being actively engaging and demanding accountability from education authorities on the provision of public basic education.
• Policy dialogues are influenced by evidence from the grass-root level for more equitable quality basic education.
• A strong coordinated voice and actions among CSOs on policy advocacy and influencing in public basic education.
• Increased commitment and political will for a more transparent, accountable, and equitable public basic education.

The intervention is designed to target marginalised groups and deprived communities and districts, as young, marginalised people, often are excluded from decision-making processes and are less represented in spaces that determines their fate. The project especially emphasises a need for the government to pay attention to policies and interventions that promote girls’ education and enhance their learning outcomes.

The CLEAR project builds on the learnings of the previous project phase, carried out between February 2022 – August 2024. The extension phase will focus especially on creating possibilities for local citizens to be part of the policy discourse at both sub-national and national levels. By having local citizens at the forefront of generating evidence and engaging with duty bearers using social accountability processes, their voices will be heard at all levels of the education policy and accountability chain.

An earlier phase of the CLEAR project was carried out between February 2022 – August 2024 . The current project is part of the EOL extension phase of 2024-2026. Read more about the first phase of the project here.