Africa Education Watch, an education policy think tank, is raising concerns that Ghana’s teacher deployment system is still uneven.
According to the organization, many rural schools remain understaffed, even though the country appears to have a surplus of teachers overall.
Speaking at a press briefing, the Executive Director, Kofi Asare, highlighted ongoing inefficiencies in how teachers are distributed across the country.
He explained that while Ghana may have enough teachers in total, many rural districts especially at the basic education level continue to face significant shortages.
“Ghana has about 15,000 more teachers than needed to meet the teacher-to-pupil ratio at the primary level,” he said, adding that the situation is different at the Junior High School level, where shortages remain, particularly in STEM subjects.
Mr Asare explained that the challenge is not necessarily recruitment, but distribution, arguing that teachers are disproportionately concentrated in urban centres at the expense of rural communities.
According to him, “about 30,000 classrooms still lack teachers due to distributive inefficiencies, culminating in surplus deployment in regional capitals, metropolitan areas, and urban municipalities.”
He further highlighted what he described as severe disparities in northern Ghana, noting that while some areas have surplus staff, rural schools remain critically underserved.
“In some districts, about 20 per cent of primary schools are being run by just one teacher,” he said, warning that such conditions undermine teaching and learning outcomes.
The organisation argues that addressing the imbalance requires deliberate policy interventions to ensure equitable deployment, particularly to rural and underserved areas.
Ghana’s education sector has, in recent years, faced ongoing debates over teacher shortages, deployment challenges, and quality of learning outcomes, especially as the government continues efforts to expand access to basic education.
Africa Education Watch says its findings should inform reforms aimed at improving efficiency and fairness in teacher allocation across the country.
