Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, Minister of Education, has revealed that the initial batch of 450,000 complimentary student tablets, funded entirely by the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND), will commence distribution in the upcoming week.
He outlined a three-phase distribution plan, with the first 450,000 tablets allocated to 32 schools to ensure the efficient rollout of a total of 1.3 million tablets.
President Akufo-Addo announced on March 25th the distribution of 1.3 million tablets to students in public Senior High Schools and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions.
Dr. Yaw Adutwum highlighted this initiative, part of the government’s Smart School Project, as a crucial step towards digitizing all sectors of the country.
During an interview on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday, March 30th, the Education Minister explained, “The 450,000 tablets represent slightly less than 30%, and the deployment is in division of three phases. The first phase, launching next week, will target 32 schools across all 16 regions.”
He mentioned the establishment of a monitoring system to ensure the efficient distribution of the tablets.
“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.”
“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 noted.
He mentioned that tablets is accompanied by keyboards, enhancing its functionality.
“There’s also a power bank in it, if power goes out, there’s a solar panel that allows you to charge it using solar in the case of this device. So, that is in response to the issue of erratic power supply at certain times.
Yaw Adutwum elaborated that this initiative is an aim at gradually replacing textbooks by integrating their content into the tablets. He mentioned that ICT Coordinators have already provided training to teachers, with ongoing sessions planned for schools receiving the tablets to ensure their efficient utilization. Dr. Adutwum clarified that the unit price for each tablet is $250, not GHS250.
The initial batch of 450,000 tablets will cost 112 million cedis, with the total of 1.3 million tablets amounting to 337 million cedis.
