55,000 Students to be offered scholarships
The Scholarship Secretariat is to offer scholarships to 55,000 students who applied to the secretariat to enable them to pursue post-secondary education in the 2021-2022 academic year.
The beneficiaries include those who applied through the district level-based online (digitised) system in their respective districts.
Already, GH¢85 million has been allocated to cater for tuition and other fees for beneficiaries to study at the diploma, degree and doctoral levels.
The Registrar of the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat, Mr Kingsley Agyemang, announced this when he opened the district level-based scholarship application portal in Accra yesterday.
The system was introduced last year, when 233,830 applications were received on the www.schalarshipgh.com portal, out of which 113,025 students were shortlisted and interviewed, with 47,000 being offered scholarships.
They subsequently received their award letters and scholarship fees totalling GH¢65 million.
According to Mr Agyemang, the portal for the 2021/2022 academic year would remain open from yesterday for local tertiary applications and last for a period of 21 days and finally close on July 21, this year.
Unsuccessful applicants
He said those who were unsuccessful and those who could not apply in the 2020/2021 academic year would be allowed to apply in the 2021/2022 academic year by going through only four stages in the application process.
He said in the secretariat’s bid to link academia to industry, the Vice-President would soon launch an industrial fair initiative, under which beneficiaries of scholarships would undergo internship training at various One-district, One-factory establishments in their various districts.
The registrar further said scholarship beneficiaries who would undergo the internship during vacation would be given stipends equivalent to what was received by national service personnel.
Application process
An applicant would first have to create an account in a web browser at www.scholarshipgh.com, complete the online application form in the system and also undertake an online aptitude test, also through the system, after which a code would be generated for him or her.
An SMS alert would then be generated and sent to the applicant indicating where and when he or she would be interviewed in the district.
According to the registrar, the digitised application system was the brainchild of the Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, who, he said, believed that technology must be used to spread social interventions to offer opportunities to all, irrespective of where they came from.
“There was a great variance between successful and unsuccessful applicants in last year’s application. This goes to confirm that had it not been for the hardworking initiative of the Vice-President, those 47,000 students would not have benefitted from the programme,” he said.