CRAN CESS Program

So at work the past few weeks I have been working closely with the social projects head on his Childhood Education Support Scheme or CESS. CESS is a program where CRAN (the social development side) pays for gifted yet needy children to attend school, beginning at the primary school level all the way until the first year at university. The funding for the school fees comes from donors around the globe, most are in Germany and some are even here in Ghana.  The only requirement is that each child is in fact needy and can perform well in school.

A while back CRAN had a staff meeting where they were discussing some policy changes to the CESS program because they were being contacted by angry donors who were not receiving positive reports about the child fund and not much was being done to correct the situation. From the meeting, it seemed like my co-workers were debating on whether or not they should stop funding these children, or come up with some new way of evaluating their performance in school. This is where I come in.

I discussed some ideas with the director of CRAN along with the accountant and the CESS program head. I proposed that a benchmark of some sort be put in place, for example a minimum GPA they need to meet each term, if they fall below have a meeting with them and their parents, if they fall below again then their school fees would no longer be covered by CRAN. This became a bit tricky though once I started working with the records. I quickly realized that the schools’ methods of grades are much different than in America, and the records kept by CRAN were mostly incomplete and not up to date or as my co-worker put it, they “keep records in their heads.” This is a struggle I had previously dealt with, the reason being that most things are done by hand here and not on a computer, so records are often misplaced or just simply not filled out correctly.

We also tossed around the idea of measuring attendance rates. There is not a compulsory school attendance law here, so a child could easily just stop showing up to class without any reprimand by parents or teachers. This seemed to spark more interest, but I was still pushing for measuring grades.

So it came down to a mixture of both, they would need to be measured side by side. I was informed that here it is not uncommon for a student to be viewed as a “serious student” but still receive poor grades; if they are showing up everyday and doing the work then they should still be considered for the program. Since I don’t have much experience with the way grades are given here, the grade minimum has yet to be set as the Director and the CESS head will decide on that later. But the recommendation has been accepted and implemented into their new policy. (My Pepperdine MPP strategy peps will know what I’m talking about J, definitely used PICORI on this)

Most of this process was very simple and people back at home would realize that using common sense would have gotten us to the final decision. But I have learned that everything is not so straightforward in a foreign country, especially a developing country, and beings an outsider, sometimes your ideas aren’t as easily accepted, no matter how logical and simple they may seem.  I was confused at first about why this wasn’t the policy from the very beginning, but the more I learned of the culture here and the way the system works the more I realized that this was a slightly harsher policy than they were used to. The culture here is very forgiving and trustworthy, they would never want to take away a child’s opportunity of access to education, but (as I tried to make them understand over and over again) this type of program needs to have effort from both sides. Yes, children are initially accepted into the program because they are gifted and needy, but they also need to prove that they are committed to it as well and not just take the money for granted. Overall, I think I made an impact, even if very small, for CRAN to have a better and more efficient program that donors are happy about.