Former beauty queen Giuseppina Baafi is on the list of scholarship recipients obtained by the Fourth Estate in response to a Freedom of Information request.
Baafi won the 2013 Miss Ghana pageant and was awarded a €18,500 scholarship to study for a master’s degree at the Shellhammer Business School in Spain.
She received the award six years after winning the coveted accolade, which later became controversial, leading to her resignation.
Sidney Osei Owusu, Kiev Kwuku Kitye and Abednego Mathias Bonyir are also on the list. They received multiple scholarships.
Sdney Osei-Owusu received £28,330 in 2019 to cover living costs and tuition fees for a Masters in Business Administration at Brunel University in London. In 2020, the Bureau again paid £15,750 for an MBA at the University of the West of England.
Kieve Kuuku Kittoe earned a Master’s degree in Design Management from Savannah College, USA in 2019 for US$38,475. The following year, Mr Kitto also completed a master’s degree in visual communications at the University of Derby for £14,500. England.
Mr. Mathias Abednego Bonir received a total of CAD 81,948.46 for the 2019 Graduate Certificate in Project Management and the 2019 Graduate Certificate in Human Resource Management. This equates to his GHS807,192 Canadian dollars (based on today’s exchange rate of 9.85). 2020. He attended Georgian University in Canada.
The office spent CAD 16,441.13 on his tuition fees in 2019 and CAD 17,507.33 in 2020. He received a monthly stipend of CAD 2,000 during his studies.
His salary alone amounted to GHS 19,700.00 per month. This amount is sufficient to cover the full tuition fee (GHS17,696) for the Master of Science in Project Management program at the Accra University of Professional Sciences (UPSA).
Bonille’s scholarship could have almost covered the total tuition fees (GHS20,423) for the Master of Science in Project Management program at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
The combined tuition and stipends for the two programs he pursued were enough to cover the tuition fees for 45 students in the Master’s in Project Management program at UPSA and 39 in the Master’s program at KNUST.
Apart from these beneficiaries, the Fourth Estate investigation found that scholarships were funneled to influential persons, children, relatives and associates of powerful people at the expense of the talented but disadvantaged. It became clear.
Fourth Estate conducted data analysis with a particular focus on Ghanaian government-funded scholarships. The analysis included a breakdown of scholarship recipients’ spending in different countries, details of the programs they pursued, and their backgrounds.
Our analysis shows that in 2019-2020, the Scholarships Secretariat awarded influential individuals and political elite actors at least GBP 291,480, USD 146,502 and CAD 7,685 respectively. ) was spent.
According to the secretariat, GHS237.5 million was disbursed in 2019 and GHS200 million in 2020.
In recent days, The Fourth Estate has published a series of reports highlighting some serious anomalies in Ghana’s scholarship system, including that a significant portion of the available funding is It is said that it was flowing to people connected to the elite.
The Fourth Division provides below the second part of the list of Ghana Government Scholarship beneficiaries for 2019 and 2020.
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