ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, the government of Ghana has persistently implemented policies designed to promote and improve the quantity, quality, and accessibility of education for all children. Examples of such policies are the Education Reform of 1987, which aimed to increase children’s education access at the basic level, and the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) policy introduced in 1995 to provide quality education in teaching and learning (Akyeampong, 2006; Senadza, 2012). The Capitation Grant of 2005/2006 was implemented to lessen the amount of money parents pay to send their children to school and to encourage parents in economically deprived areas to send their children, especially the girl-child, to school. To this end, the Ministry of Education subsequently designed and implemented a policy with goals of (a) increasing girls’ enrollment in basic education; (b) reducing the drop out rate of girls from 30% to 10%; (c) increasing the transition rate of girls from basic education (elementary and junior high school) to the senior secondary school from 30% to 50%; and (d) exposing 10,000 girls in pre-tertiary education to science, technology, and mathematics education (STME) to encourage more girls to choose science and science-related subjects at the senior secondary school (SSS) level (Ministry of Education, 2010).
