The Education Minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, has disclosed that distribution of the primary batch of 450,000 free tablets to college students beneath the Smart School Project will happen this week.
The tablets are totally funded by the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund).
According to the Minister, the distribution course of has been fastidiously organised into three phases to make sure the efficient supply of 1.3 million tablets to specified faculties throughout the nation.
In an interview on JoyNews, the Bosomtwe lawmaker identified that this transfer by the Akufo-Addo authorities, beneath the Smart School Project, is central to its “digitisation agenda” for all sectors throughout the nation.
“The 450,000 is a little less than 30 percent, the deployment is such that it is in three phases. The first phase which is hitting the regions and schools in the next coming week, is going to 32 schools in the 16 regions,” Dr. Adutwum defined.
He went on to speak in regards to the monitoring system put in place to ensure the tablets are distributed effectively.
“Once it gets to the school, there is a dashboard that informs us the tablets are here. The whole idea is to ensure that you will do a phased approach to deployment and don’t get the system overwhelmed,” he emphasised.
“Once we get them to the 32 schools, then within a week or two thereafter the rest which is phase two also starts moving to the schools, so it’s a phased deployment,” he added.
He additional famous that plans are far superior to step by step section out textbooks by integrating them onto the tablets.
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He added that ICT coordinators in faculties have offered coaching to lecturers and can proceed to coach faculties receiving tablets on their efficient utilization.
Dr. Adutwum additionally maintained that the funding within the tablets is equally necessary, regardless of considerations that the transfer is a “misplaced priority.”
“Logistical challenges of the Free SHS programme are separate from budgetary constraints, clarifying that funds allotted for this pill venture beneath the federal government’s digitalization agenda can’t be diverted to handle feeding challenges confronted by college students beneath the coverage.
“The interesting thing about Free SHS is that you can have logistical challenges and that’s not a budget issue, so we have 1.4 million children miles away that we are feeding a day, you can have challenges where food may not have reached a certain location on time,” Dr. Adutwum defined.
He clarified that the price of every system was $250, opposite to claims that the unit worth was GHS250.