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| Dr Margaret Nkrumah,Vice-President of the SOS Children’s Villages Ghana, giving her keynote address at the symposium in Accra.
Story: Mary Ankrah
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A SYMPOSIUM that is aimed at giving insights into the various courses offered under the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme and ensure its growth in Africa, has taken place at the Lincoln Community School at Abelemkpe in Accra.
The symposium discussed the challenges and opportunities for IB programmes in Africa; support the formation of a West African IB Association, discuss the development of a strategic plan for Africa and to provide the opportunity for schools to know about programme updates and new IB initiatives.
It was also to let school authorities which desire to offer IB programmes to learn at first hand the steps needed to set the programme rolling.
The event brought together heads of schools, local and international lecturers, seven officials from the IB headquarters in the Netherlands and IB coordinators across Africa.
The IB is a non-profit educational foundation that focuses on pupils aged between 3 and 12 and it offers three internationally recognised programmes including Primary Year programme (PYP), Middle Year Programme (MYP) and Diploma Programme.
The PYP for pupils aged 3 to 12 focuses on the development of the whole child as an inquirer in the classroom and in the world outside, while the MYP for students aged 11 to 16 provides a framework of academic challenges and life skills through embracing and transcending traditional school subjects, and the Diploma Programme for students aged between 16 to 19 is a demanding two-year curriculum that meets the needs of highly motivated students, and leads to a qualification that is recognised by leading universities around the world.
Founded in 1968, IB works with 3,380 schools in 141 countries across the world including Ghana.
Speaking at the function, the Vice-President of the SOS Children’s Villages Ghana, Dr Margaret Nkrumah, said Africa needed a vigorous attempt to make the IB programmes accessible to state-owned schools in Africa for children to achieve the highest academic level attainment.
However, she indicated that the main challenges confronting the IB programmes in Africa were due to cost, lack of trained and experienced teachers to teach them, and the absence of a certifying examination at the end of the MYP course.
Dr Nkrumah pointed out that though several attempts were made between 2002 and 2006 by the Deputy Director-General of the IB organisation, Dr Ian Hill, to introduce the diploma programme into five state-owned schools in Ghana, namely Achimota, Wesley Girls, Mfantsipim, Presec and Aburi Girls, none of the schools could pay the fees and there was no political will or support from the Ghana Education Service (GES) to accept the competing programme of IB.
That notwithstanding, she said, many state and privately owned schools in Africa would be willing to adopt and introduce IB programmes in their school curriculum if the cost of IB programmes was reduced.
She recommended that the IB organisation comes up with more training programmes in Africa.
She commended LCS for becoming the first and only school in Ghana to offer the three IB programmes despite the challenges and urged the school to share knowledge and experience with less-endowed schools to learn from the school.
Dr Nkrumah contended that “A good education is without price and if Africa was ready to fulfil its potential and emerge out of poverty and exploitation, it needed to move away from rote learning and mere absorption of irrelevant facts and ensure a population which could think, analyse, create and take responsibilities for their lives”.
Schools which have so far introduced the IB programmes in their curriculum include LCS, Tema International School and SOS.
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