Why are there no libraries in Ghana?

This is the question I asked my dad as we drove down the crumbly Accra-Tema motorway one hot April evening. You might wonder what I’m talking about: of course there are libraries in Ghana. But I’m not talking about little book rooms set up in private institutions and schools which the brightest student stumbles upon once in a while. Neither am I talking about the few humongous stone buildings set up in University centers accessible to the whole of Ghana but with the capacity to hold a few thousand visitors, to give a few hundreds of students the ability to borrow and to hold the interest of the least amount of people. I’m talking about centers of learning through books in every single district of Ghana: places where intellectuals and labourers alike can comfortably sit down and read stories in different languages, resources books, and articles and read research.

And what about children? The only time the Ghanaian child gets to sit down and study is only during school hours and by the time they’ve travelled through traffic and tried to scribble something for homework , classes have effectively become their sleeping time. At home, kids have to go round to help their parents, eat and sleep for the next day. This is not enough. Why can’t we encourage our kids to be more studious? If we could have learning centers where children could read comics and story books in addition to textbooks, they could become 21st century learners who will later add to the work force and move Ghana forward. But here I am fighting the cause of communal libraries when you find that there are a lot of schools who don’t even have libraries themselves. Doesn’t this talk much about the quality and limits of research that pupils can undertake? What level of education are Ghanaian kids getting if their schools don’t provide libraries for them to not only do further learning but also to find a conducive learning environment?

In chapter 5 of the Ghanaian constitution, the Ghanaian right to equal educational opportunities and facilities is advocated in article 25. It also states that functional literacy shall be encouraged and intensified as far as possible. Despite this law on our basic educational human rights, our years of independence have not led to a fully educated workforce. From statistics recorded in 2009, the literacy rate of the Ghanaian population is only 66.62%. If you want to hide something from a black man, you can still put it in a book. Children are subject to compulsory primary education but when they reach the Senior High School level more than half drop out. If these dropouts had easy access to a local library their studies could proceed further.

I’m not here to criticize the government on why this and that hasn’t been done. Every Ghanaian is doing that job nowadays. Let me just take time to consider Ghana’s financial situation and the financial constraints of taking these projects. It could be a bit much for our stage of development.

So coming back to my opening question: what was my dad’s answer? Well, He said that the government has a lot on its hands (evidently) but what are the district Chief Executives doing? What projects are their offices rolling out to gain local revenue to fund development into local infrastructure? If the districts didn’t just rely on the government to give them funds but were able to raise enough revenue from district taxes they could do a lot more than just building a few roads around their regions.

Now to me, that sounds like a more sustainable idea. If we rely on the central government for everything then we’re going to have to put “more libraries” at a bottom of a long bucket list filled with the more urgent needs of roads, hospitals and jobs. What do you think?

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Article by Abena Kusi

Intern at the Human Rights Advocacy Center

16 Year old IB Student at Tema International School