Why Ghana's free SHS policy is short of the resources it needs
The Free Senior High School programme, launched in September 2017, remains one of the most ambitious social interventions in modern Ghanaian history. By absorbing tuition, boarding fees and feeding costs, it pushed enrolment past 1.2 million pupils in its first year and reshaped public expectations of what the state owes its young people.
Yet more than six years on, the funding model behind that promise continues to lag behind the reality on the ground. Annual budgets have rarely matched the actual cost per student, school feeding grants are routinely delayed, and headmasters in districts such as Sefwi and the Northern Region report receiving only a fraction of what was promised before each academic year.
Ghana is not alone in wrestling with the arithmetic of universal access. In Sydney and Brisbane, state school systems absorb similar shocks when federal allocations fall short, and the funding disputes between Canberra and the states echo the central-versus-regional tensions familiar in Accra. Australia, however, has tools Ghana lacks: a mature revenue base anchored by the goods and services tax, a compulsory superannuation system that lifts the burden of retirement off the public purse, and a sovereign wealth tradition born of the mining boom.
The annual funding shortfall
Budget papers reveal a widening gap between rhetoric and releases. Independent estimates put the true annual cost of Free SHS somewhere between GHS 8 billion and GHS 12 billion, while the Ministry of Finance has consistently allocated closer to GHS 5 billion. That deficit compounds year after year, leaving the Ghana Education Service to absorb the gap through delayed disbursements to schools.
The capitation grant that previously supported fee-paying public schools was effectively absorbed into the Free SHS budget, but the absorption was never matched by equivalent new streams of revenue. Oil receipts have been volatile, donor support from partners such as the World Bank has shifted toward specific interventions, and domestic tax-to-GDP ratios have crept up only slowly.
The double-track symptom
Introduced in 2018 to absorb the enrolment surge, the double-track system sends half of each cohort home while the other half attends classes, then swaps them midway through the year. It was meant as a temporary measure, but limited classroom and hostel capacity is itself a symptom of underfunding. Schools simply were not built fast enough to accommodate the wave of new students who arrived once fees were abolished.
The system compresses the academic calendar, leaves students with roughly 40 per cent less contact time, and forces teachers to mark continuously. Critics in Australia, where school infrastructure is funded jointly by the Commonwealth and the states, would recognise the pattern. When Brisbane or Hobart schools exceed enrolment projections, mobile classrooms appear quickly; in Ghana, the response is a system-wide calendar change that dilutes the learning experience.
Infrastructure and staffing pressures
Free SHS inherited an asset base that had been eroded by years of neglect, and the additional intake placed extraordinary strain on what remained. Many senior high schools operate with science laboratories that have not been refurbished in over a decade, libraries stocked with outdated texts, and boarding facilities built for half their current populations.
Teacher recruitment has struggled to keep pace. While the government has hired thousands of new teachers since 2017, attrition from retirement and the lure of private tutoring means classrooms in rural districts remain oversized. In some schools, classes of 70 or 80 students are taught by a single teacher, a scenario unimaginable in suburban Melbourne or Adelaide but routine in places like Kintampo and Yola.
Political pressures and electoral cycles
Funding decisions are rarely made on technical merit alone. The Free SHS policy carries the NPP's signature, and the opposition NDC has proposed modifying rather than dismantling it, partly because of its popularity with voters. Annual budget allocations become acts of political signalling, and any suggestion of trimming benefits risks accusations of betrayal.
Australian readers will recognise a similar dynamic. Federal commitments to school funding are scrutinised ahead of every election, and the funding of universities through HECS-HELP has shifted in response to political pressure as much as fiscal logic. The lesson is that large social commitments need clearly defined revenue streams attached to them from the outset.
Donor funding and external constraints
International partners once financed a significant share of Ghana's education sector through budget support and targeted programmes. That model has largely faded, replaced by project-based aid that cannot be used for recurrent costs. The result is that recurrent expenses, including meals, boarding subsidies and teacher salaries, must be met almost entirely from domestic resources.
This arrangement has parallels with Australia's approach to development assistance, where the focus has shifted from direct budget support to partnerships with specific outcomes. The structural imbalance is not unique to Ghana, but the depth of Ghana's dependence on volatile revenue streams makes the exposure sharper.
The path to sustainable financing
A growing chorus of fiscal analysts argues that Ghana needs a dedicated financing mechanism for Free SHS, insulated from the wider budget cycle. Proposals have ranged from earmarking a share of value-added tax receipts to levies on specific sectors, including mining and telecommunications. Others suggest a contributory element from affluent households, perhaps mirroring Australia's HECS-HELP model that recovers some cost from graduates earning above the repayment threshold.
None of these reforms are politically easy. Earmarking tax revenue takes cash away from another priority, and reintroducing any form of fee risks being framed as a betrayal of the policy's promise. Yet the alternative, running a flagship programme on hope and improvisation, is no longer sustainable.
Comparing Ghana and Australia
The contrast between the two systems reveals both the depth of Ghana's challenge and the room it has to manoeuvre. Where Australian schools draw on a diversified revenue mix and long institutional capacity, Ghana's flagship programme depends on a single source of recurrent funding and an asset base that was already strained before enrolment doubled.
| Feature | Ghana's free SHS | Australia's school system |
|---|---|---|
| Launch year | 2017 | Universal access evolved from the 1870s onward |
| Funding source | General government revenue, oil receipts | Commonwealth and state tied grants |
| Cost per student | Estimated well below actual need | Heavily subsidised through public funding |
| Recurrent burden | Central government | Shared between federal and state governments |
| Infrastructure response | Double-track calendar | Mobile classrooms and new builds |
| Tertiary parallel | None currently | HECS-HELP income-contingent loan |
The same comparison underscores how much weight Ghana's recurrent budget now carries. Without comparable borrowing headroom, insurance buffers or capital reserves, even modest fluctuations in oil receipts or tax collection leave Free SHS exposed. Australia's federated model, with its overlapping federal and state commitments, offers more redundancy than Ghana's centralised arrangement currently provides.
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