The Fourth Estate, a private media organization, has stated its plan to publish the whole list of scholarship recipients for 2019 and 2020, as revealed by their investigative report.
The Fourth Estate conducted an investigation and discovered that influential people, as well as children, relatives, and associates of powerful figures, were awarded scholarships, which contradicted the Scholarship Secretariat’s primary goal of providing local and foreign scholarships to academically gifted but financially needy students.
The Scholarship Secretariat first denied access to the beneficiary list in March 2021, but The Fourth Estate persevered and filed a Right to Information (RTI) request with the Commission.
The RTI Commission found in favor of disclosure, arguing that because the scholarships were sponsored with public funds, openness was essential. However, personal information will be removed before the data is distributed.
The Scholarship Secretariat’s response to to the RTI request revealed that it spent GHS237.5 million and GHS200 million in 2019 and 2020, respectively, on international and local scholarships.
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In an interview with the host of the Citi Breakfast Show, Bernard Avle, on Citi FM, which was monitored by ATLFM, Seth Kwame Bokpe, a journalist with the Fourth Estate, stated, “There are a few of over 900 people who benefited from the secretariat, and we will be publishing the full list soon and conducting a value-for-money analysis.”
A major portion of the scholarship recipients were known members and activists of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), notably , a special assistant to the Second Lady, Samira Bawumia.
The special assistant was paid GBP17,355 to attend a university in the United Kingdom, but he didn’t show up on campus and pulled out of the programme after only taking a few online classes from Ghana.
There were also reports of numerous scholarships. At least 26 persons got several scholarships, allowing them to pursue various programs over two consecutive years or in a single year.
