This blog was written by Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem, practitioner researcher and Assistant Director, Programmes, at The Education Collaborative, Ashesi University. Nana Ama is also a co-founder of Think Education, an organisation that works with school leaders and educators in low-cost private schools to strengthen school leadership and education practice.

There is an African proverb that many know but few education systems seem to have taken seriously: ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. In pre-colonial Ghana, this was beyond metaphor, and instead, more of a governance model. Education was communal, decentralised and embedded in daily life, transmitted through elders, families and artisans. A child’s development belonged to the whole community, not to any single institution.

Then the colonial administration came and replaced the village with a ministry.

The 1852 Education Ordinance marked the beginning of formalised, centralised state control over education in Ghana. Mission schools and colonial curricula delegitimised indigenous knowledge systems, installing in their place a model premised on a single central authority as the only legitimate source of education. This assumption, that legitimacy flows from the state, has proven remarkably durable in the decades since independence.

It is this inheritance, more than any technical oversight, that explains one of the most striking contradictions in Ghanaian education today.

The gap the data cannot hide

Across Ghana, low-cost private schools have grown in communities where families needed schools, and the state was not present to provide them, or at least provide sufficiently. In Northern Ghana alone, USAID estimated in 2021 that there were around 751 such schools, representing 65% of all private schools in the region and enrolling over 45,000 students. Nationally, the Ministry of Education reports that schools run by the private sector constitute one-third of all basic schools in the country.

These schools did not emerge from abstract market logic. Most grew from community initiatives, individuals responding to immediate need, gathering children together, and building over time what parents and communities demanded. They are, in the most direct sense, the village still raising the child.

Yet, despite this, these schools remain largely absent from the policy conversations that shape the system they are quietly sustaining. National curriculum reforms, teacher development frameworks, school improvement programmes and financing mechanisms are still designed primarily with public schools in mind. As global platforms, such as UNESCO’s Education 2030 agenda, emphasise, “all children deserve to be recognized and supported by their government, regardless of whether they are state or non-state educated.” However, a system that speaks about reaching all children while designing for a fraction of the schools those children actually attend is not a coherent system. It is a partial one. This partiality has colonial roots and reflects a deeper logic about who counts.

What Sankofa asks of education planning

The Akan concept of Sankofa is often invoked as cultural symbolism. But applied seriously, it demands something more practical: retrieving from the past what remains useful for navigating the present.

Pre-colonial learning systems understood something that current policy frameworks often overlook, that education is inherently social. As thinkers such as Kwame Gyekye and John Mbiti have articulated, the individual is shaped through relationships, obligations and the collective life of the community. Education, in this sense, is not delivered by a central authority to passive recipients. It is a shared act of the community, distributed across a network of actors. This is a recognition that Ghana’s education system already functions this way in practice. Families, communities and non-state providers collectively sustain learning for millions of children.

Low-cost private schools are a contemporary expression of this distributed system. Their marginalisation from policy processes reproduces an older pattern in which local initiative and community knowledge are systematically pushed aside in favour of centralised control.

What a coherent, decolonial approach actually requires

Scholars of decolonising school leadership, including Khalifa and colleagues, argue that a genuinely decolonised education system must connect with and empower communities, as active stakeholders in educational provision, not as passive recipients of state programmes. Extending this lens to the broader system in Ghana means recognising low-cost private schools not as a problem to be managed, but as partners to be integrated.

If Ghana’s education system is already sustained by a wider ‘village’, then policy needs to catch up with that reality. This does not mean abandoning the role of the state, nor does it require romanticising community provision. Low-cost private schools face real challenges around teacher qualifications, equity of access, and learning outcomes, and these challenges deserve honest engagement. But the response to those challenges cannot be continued exclusion. It has to be integration, support and the kind of mutual accountability that the village model always demanded.

A more coherent approach would begin by recognising non-state providers, including low-cost private schools, as legitimate and permanent actors within the system. This requires their structured inclusion in national education planning processes, particularly in discussions on curriculum, financing and quality assurance, rather than their treatment as occasional consultees.

It would also require extending support frameworks beyond the public sector. Teacher development initiatives, school improvement programmes and accountability mechanisms should be designed to reach all schools serving disadvantaged communities, not only those under direct state management.

Financing approaches must shift as well. If the goal is equitable access to quality education, then funding mechanisms, whether through subsidies, scholarships or targeted support, must follow learners across different types of provision, rather than being confined to a single institutional model.

For international partners, this raises a deeper question about what counts as ‘the system’? Too often, global education frameworks apply assumptions shaped in the Global North, where private schooling is associated with exclusivity and stratification. In many contexts across the Global South, however, low-cost private schools and other non-state providers play a different role. A global education architecture that takes context and difference seriously must move beyond binary assumptions and engage with this plurality as a starting point, not an exception.

A different question

The language of partnership is now common in education policy, however, remains rhetorical quite too often. Recognising the ‘village’ as a foundational principle would require moving beyond language toward structural inclusion of actors, knowledge and practices that already sustain the system.

If the village is still raising the child, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests it is, why are we still designing systems as if it is not?