Ghana is characterised as a ‘competitive clientelist’ type of political settlement, in which two parties – the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) – have consistently challenged each other in national elections. In this context, the incentives of ruling elites can become loaded towards the use of public institutions in politicised ways to secure short-term gains. This has implications for the education sector in Ghana, which has historically been seen by its ruling elites as critical, both to their means of staying in power through increased legitimacy and to their ideas of promoting national development.
Key findings of this brief:
- Ghana’s blend of multi-party competition and patron-client politics generates much stronger incentives to improve access to education than to improve the quality of education. The general failure to improve accountability in the education sector, particularly regarding the proportion of highly-trained teachers who spend time on task, has led to poor educational outcomes that directly reflect how politics and governance work in Ghana
- Ghana’s competitive clientelist settlement has tended to generate a high degree of policy incoherence and politicisation within the education sector. Governance arrangements are usually poorly aligned with the prevailing balance of power at multiple levels of the educational system
- where good practice does emerge, this is usually through the efforts of reform-minded coalitions of state and non-state actors at district and school levels, with the capacity to devise and enforce problem-solving solutions to local problems
- decentralisation reforms have created the space for these kinds of coalitions to emerge, but have not systematically improved performance. This is because of failures to ensure coherence with centralised aspects of educational sector governance, as well the ways in which district-level politics play out