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The entire area, situated in the Western part of Northern Region, covers an area of 9,200 square kilometres and was until recently one district (Bole district). The Sawla-Tuna-Kalba District became a district only in February 2005. A number of ethnic groups can be found in the two districts, however, the major tribes in the area are the Gonjas, Moos, Vaglas and Brifos. Numerically, the Gonjas and the Moos dominate the population in the Bole district whiles the Vaglas and Brifos dominate the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba district.
These different ethnic groups exhibit different cultural practices, but the practices which stand out in terms of their negative repercussions on formal education include child betrothal, early marriage, child labour, elopement and initiation of children and its attendant change of names of children.
There are a large number of communities in the Bole and Sawla-Tuna-Kalba districts which do not have access to basic education. For example, in the Kalba area of the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba district, there are about 80 Brifo Communities, yet only 40 of these communities have basic schools. The obvious effect of the problem is that children in communities where there is no school at all are unable to enrol in school.
For communities where there is no formal basic school, the only option for children is to walk to another community to access formal school. The journey to school turns out to be a rather long distance and pupils arrive in school late, tired and hungry. This discourages many of them and they eventually drop out of school. For others especially girls, distance to school is a big barrier to education because of the risk of rape and marriages of inconvenience.
In more than 70% of the schools in the two districts, the ratio of outdated textbooks to pupils is 1:20. Pupil-teacher ratio for the 2 districts is 60:1
There is a shortage of trained teachers in the two districts and it is very common to find a whole basic school (i.e. 6 primary classes and 3 Junior Secondary School classes) with only 2 or 3 trained teachers. Cases of only 1 trained teacher responsible for one basic school also abound in the area. Communities such as Nyange, Jentilpe, Yipala and Kanchen are only few examples of community based schools where trained teachers are terribly in short supply.
Despite the effort by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to recruit untrained teachers (popularly called pupil teachers), the teacher situation in the two districts is still dismal.
On average, girls' enrolment, retention and completion rate in basic education are lower than that of boys. In the academic 2004/05 45 % of the children enrolled in primary school were girls but only 33% of the pupils enrolled at the J.S.S level in Bole District were girls. The situation is reinforced, among other things, by patriarchy, poverty and the lack of female role models.
Cultural practices, beliefs and perceptions about the female also limit girls' access to basic education. Betrothal, early marriage and the objectification of women and girls as objects of sex and slaves in marital homes influence parents to refuse to give their daughters formal education.
Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), School Management Committees, (SMCs) and Community Participation Committees (CPCs) exist in virtually all the community based schools. However, they are not functioning as they should. Generally, community people fail to see it as their role to support school head teachers in the governance and management of schools, as a result of which many schools in the area are facing numerous problems.
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