In the 2018 budget, GH¢455.9million of petroleum revenues was allocated to the Free SHS programme”. According to him, the Free SHS is ensuring that the country’s oil revenues are being equitably distributed to the people, and not ending up in the pockets of a few. However, since government announced it will use oil money to fund the Free SHS policy, there has been criticism by some civil society groups that it is risky for government to rely solely on oil revenue to fund the Free SHS programme – insisting that it must diversify its sources of funding for the programme due to instability of oil prices on the world market. Before the Free SHS programme was introduced, the total population of students in SHS stood at 432,780 per the 2016 academic year data, with GH¢2,312 spent on each student per year by government. But this could significantly reduce as the Free SHS programme has encouraged a lot of enrollment at the secondary school level.

Source: GhanaWeb May 21, 2019 13:07 UTC