Mr Richard Kovey, the Convenor, Campaign Against Privatisation and Commercialisation of Education (CAPCOE), says teachers in Ghana spend between 35 and 40 per cent of their monthly salaries on transportation to and from school.
He told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview that the finding was revealed in a preliminary study, examining the conditions under which teachers worked, and the financial demands associated with their profession.
He said the situation was particularly burdening for teachers posted to schools located far from their homes, where transportation costs could accumulate significantly over the course of a month.
Mr Kovey noted that accommodation was another major expenditure confronting teachers, particularly those working in urban areas, where rent could consume more than 30 per cent of their salaries, stressing that the combined effect of transportation and accommodation costs placed considerable pressure on teachers.
The CAPCOE convenor said the current concerns of teachers should not be viewed from the perspective of promotion alone, since that provided limited immediate financial benefits, stating that “Promotion basically brings very little to the table in terms of financial gains.”
He explained that while promotion was important for career progression and access to positions of responsibility, improved conditions of service had a more direct impact on teachers’ financial wellbeing.
He said teachers would be less concerned about some administrative challenges if their conditions of service adequately addressed their financial and professional needs and advocated the development of a robust digital system to reduce delays and administrative difficulties associated with the process.
Mr Kovey suggested that promotion examination results should be integrated into the Ghana Education Service (GES) Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS), where teachers’ employment records were already maintained.
That way, the system would automatically identify teachers who had successfully completed promotion examinations and reduce the need for repeated manual verification of documents and strengthen efforts to address corruption and payroll-related fraud by allowing relevant information to be verified electronically.
He further raised concerns about the manual signing of promotion letters, saying the current Director-General of the Ghana Education Service was required to sign more than 80,000 promotion letters with wet ink, stressing that the process placed a significant administrative burden on him and could contribute to delays in issuing promotion letters.
