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On December 17, 2024, Asaase Radio, an Accra-based station, claimed on its X account that nearly 6 million students had benefitted from the Free Senior High School programme.
This claim, however, is not new and has been echoed by various political leaders of the NPP and institutions in recent months, despite evidence to the contrary.
On August 18, 2024, during the NPP’s manifesto launch, the National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Stephen Ntim claimed that 5.7 million students had benefitted from the policy since its inception in 2017.
At the launch of the Smart Schools project on March 25, President Akufo Addo said “5.1 million children have so far benefitted from the Free SHS programme since it was instituted in September 2017.”
At the same event, the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum said “today, some 5.7 million children who are our own children, brothers, and sisters have benefited from the programme.” The minister’s figure indicated that 600,000 more students had benefited from the policy, higher than what the president mentioned.
In a community engagement in Amasaman in the Ga West Municipality in September 2024, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia also repeated that the Free SHS programme has benefitted 5.7 million children with enrolment increasing from 800,000 to 1.4 million now.
Kennedy Agyapong repeated the same claim during the NPP’s final rally on December 5, 2024.
Fact-Check Ghana had earlier debunked these claims as inaccurate. The details are below.
On Thursday, July 18, 2018, the former Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta presented to the 2018 Mid-Year Policy Review of that year’s budget to parliament .
He told the House that due to the implementation of the Free SHS Policy, an additional 90,000 students who would have dropped out of school now had access to secondary education. He added that as of July 18, 2018, almost a year after the implementation of the policy, over 350,000 first year students were benefiting from the initiative.
“Currently, a total of 362,118 first-year students from all public SHS are benefiting from the programme. This is made up of 177,692 day students and 244,426 boarding students,” he said.
According to the Ministry of Finance, the total beneficiaries of the Free SHS policy from 2017 to 2024 are 3,135,754.
This figure is significantly lower than the 6 million mentioned by Asaase and the 5.7 million claimed by President Akufo-Addo and some leading members of the NPP and the government. Therefore claims suggesting that 6 million or 5.7 million students benefitted from the Free SHS programme are inaccurate.
