The Parliamentary Select Committee on Education paid a working visit to the Ghana Commission for UNESCO (NATCOM Ghana), touring the Commission’s offices and interacting with staff, as part of a nationwide monitoring exercise covering all agencies under the Ministry of Education. The visit, led by the Committee Chairman, Hon. Peter Nortsu-Kotoe, forms part of a programme running from Tuesday, 23rd June to Wednesday, 1st July, 2026, and is being carried out pursuant to Order 250 of the Standing Orders of Parliament, which mandates the Committee to investigate and examine the activities and administration of Ministries, Departments and Agencies under its oversight.
A 22-member delegation is undertaking the visits, which are intended to gather first-hand insights to inform policy decisions and enhance the quality of education in Ghana. Beyond NATCOM Ghana, the programme covers other Ministry of Education agencies, including the Ghana Education Service, the Ghana Library Authority, the Commission for Technical and Vocational Education Training, the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, and the West African Examinations Council, among others.
The NATCOM Ghana leg followed an earlier engagement with the Minister for Education, the Deputy Minister, and senior Ministry directors, at which the Committee Chairman explained that the Committee was deliberately moving away from summoning agencies to Parliament and instead visiting them on their own ground, noting that some members did not even know where certain agencies, including NATCOM Ghana, were located.
Members of the Committee moved through the Commission’s various offices, meeting staff and getting a first-hand sense of the day-to-day work behind the Commission’s programmes.
In discussions with the Secretary-General, the Committee was briefed on the office space challenges facing the Commission, an issue that bears directly on its capacity to service its expanding mandate. The Secretary-General used the engagement to walk members through NATCOM Ghana’s contribution to advancing education, the sciences, culture, and communication in the country, underscoring the breadth of work the Commission undertakes relative to its current resourcing, and identifying it among the challenges affecting service delivery that the Committee had set out to uncover.
The visit took place against the backdrop of the Committee’s engagement with the Minister for Education on pressing sector priorities, including a planned national conference on school discipline before the end of July, curriculum reforms introducing robotics, coding, and artificial intelligence into basic education, continued investment in TVET and senior high school infrastructure, and the planned recruitment of 7,000 additional teachers from July. The Committee indicated that direct visits of this kind, to the Ministry and to its agencies, will continue through the rest of the programme and beyond, as part of its oversight work.
Ghana Commission for UNESCO welcomed the engagement as an opportunity to showcase its work to Ghana’s lawmakers and to raise, at first hand, the operational constraints affecting its ability to deliver on UNESCO’s mandate in the country.
