A critical citizen, Lawrence Agbenorku, has written a compelling open letter to the Ministry of Education after attending the IDP Study World Expo in Accra, which recorded over 5,000 Ghanaian youth.
In a Sunday story shared on his Facebook page sighted by HeraldGH, Agbenorku said he attended the expo with his younger brother, who had just completed SHS with flying colours. According to him, what he saw at the expo was not just a study abroad fair for the privileged few, but a movement that should worry policymakers.
IDP is one of the largest international education organisations in the world. They operate in over fifty countries. They place students into universities across six major English-speaking destinations — the UK, Australia, Canada, US, Ireland and New Zealand, he wrote.
Agbenorku said a single course title at a New Zealand university booth stopped him completely: Resource Drilling Technology. He described it as a full undergraduate programme built around the science, engineering and sustainable management of natural resource extraction — mining, drilling, geothermal energy, mineral processing.
I stood there and felt something I can only describe as a particular kind of embarrassment. Because I was looking at a course designed for a continent like Africa — built for the resource economics that define us, the extraction industries that our governments negotiate around, the ground beneath our feet that multinational corporations spend billions accessing — and it was being taught in New Zealand, he lamented
He argued that Ghana has the resources but is sending its children abroad to learn how to manage them.
We have the resources. We are sending our children abroad to learn how to manage them. And when they learn, the world benefits from that knowledge more than we do
According to Agbenorku, the pattern repeated across all booths. He listed courses such as Climate-resilient Urban Design for countries dealing with flooding and heat, Food Systems Technology for food insecurity, Public Infrastructure Financing for debt management, and AI Applications in Healthcare for countries with low doctor-to-patient ratios.
Course after course after course, built to solve problems that are most acute in the developing world, and packaged and delivered by institutions in the developed one. The young Ghanaian who wants to become the person who fixes these problems in Ghana has to leave Ghana to learn how, he wrote.
He said the problem may not just be how Ghana is teaching, but what it is teaching. He cited Civil Engineering as an example — a broad discipline that covers roads, bridges, water systems and drainage — which produces generalists for a country with very specific problems.
Accra floods every rainy season. Not because nobody knows what flooding is. Because we do not have enough people trained specifically in flood control systems — stormwater modelling, urban drainage design, permeable surface engineering. There is an entire discipline living inside civil engineering that addresses exactly what is killing our cities every wet season, and we do not offer it as a standalone programme at any institution in this country,” he argued.
He also questioned why Ghana does not have programmes like Local Building Materials Engineering to study laterite, bamboo, clay and timber for sustainable construction, instead of depending on imported cement and steel.
Agbenorku concluded that the 5,000 young people who trooped to the expo are not the problem, but evidence of a curriculum design and national strategy failure.
The young people leaving that hall yesterday are not the problem. They are the evidence. We are not short of ambition. We are short of specificity, he said.
He called on the Ministry of Education to move from broad, generalist degrees to specific, problem-solving programmes that directly address Ghana’s most urgent challenges — from flooding to housing to food security.
You can also read from Lawrence Agbenorku on building permit process
This article is based on an opinion shared by Lawrence Agbenorku on his Facebook page. The claims and views expressed in the original commentary are attributed to him and have not been independently verified by HeraldGH
