The Administrator of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), Dr. Richard Ampofo Boadu has refuted claims being bandied about that GETFund has collateralized its receivables to borrow to the tune of one billion, five hundred million dollars ($1.5 billion).
‘’Such narrative is a complete twist of facts surrounding this particular subject matter, I guess it is for diabolical purposes’’, the Administrator stated. He explained that sometime in 2019, Parliament approved an amount of $1.5 billion in the cedi equivalent, for GETFund to borrow on the capital market to enable the Fund finance emergency projects particularly, in the second cycle institutions, as enrollments had surged due to Free SHS. He further stated that the Trust Board therefore undertook a combination of loan syndications from some selected banks and bond issuance on the capital market and raised a total of GHC 3.42 billion as of December 2022.
The GETFund Administrator was addressing the 56th National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) Delegates Conference, at the University of Cape Coast as the Chairman of the Seminar held as a precursor to the opening ceremony. He assured the audience that despite the current financial inflows facing the Fund, his administration and the Board have chalked multiple successes in supplementing the financing of the education budget of the country since 2017.
He praised the past leadership of NUGS, as the setting up of GETFund via a Parliamentary Enactment, Act 581, 2000, was traceable to their unflinching advocacy towards ensuring adequate funding for education in the country.
Dr. Boadu clarified that the Scholarship at the Fund is not the typical meritorious standards operated at the Scholarship Secretariat and other scholarship award schemes in the system. ‘’Ours is mainly to support capacity building and the continuous professional training and education for workers and students’’, he elaborated. He concluded that the Fund this year has doubled the number of scholarship beneficiaries from a little over two thousand (2,000) in 2022 to more than four thousand (4,000) in 2023 in the local universities (private and public)
