A classroom block where about 140 schoolchildren of the Kankoom D/A KG-Primary School in Bongo, a border district in Ghana’s Upper East region, currently are learning is in what extremely worried observers have described as a heartbreaking condition.
The building has been in that state, as shown here in a fresh wad of pictures taken just yesterday (Wednesday) by the author of this report, since a rainstorm hit the school on Monday, 5 June 2017.
The angry storm broke the planks used in roofing the block. It selected several sheets from the roof at random, unfastened them from their nails and scattered them across the community. Then, it rolled up a portion of the roof aside like a mat, leaving the classrooms open to the sky from the rooftop, before it ceased and left the premises.
For the past eight years, the schoolchildren who find themselves in these classrooms learn under the direct rays of the sun. It houses pupils from primary one to four.
The school is not far from the house of a former parliamentary candidate of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) for Bongo, George Afari, at Zorkor. In fact, the school is so close to the house one can comfortably choose to walk the distance between them without breathing.
Members of the community say the current Member of Parliament (MP) for Bongo, Charles Bawa Duah, vigorously campaigned in front of the school in 2024 and made a passionate promise to put a new roof over the schoolchildren’s heads.
The MP has done nothing about it since he took over from Edward Bawa, who equally failed to attend to the problem throughout his eight uninterrupted years in parliament from 2017 to 2025.
While Peter Ayamga Ayinbisa was in charge of Bongo as the District Chief Executive (DCE) and unsuccessfully ran for parliament in 2020 on the ticket of the then-governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), he did not fix it.
Ayinbisa’s successor, Rita Atanga, similarly did not notice the plight of the schoolchildren until she left office after the NPP government lost power in December, 2024.
Joseph Akaseke Abaa, who succeeded Atanga this year as DCE under the new government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), equally has not seen the urgent need to visit the school or do anything about the crisis after the community drew his attention to the situation this year.
The impacts of the neglect
When this author visited the community on Wednesday, 18 June 2025, residents said the partially roofless school block was not safe for learning under any weather conditions.
The inside of the classroom block bears a striking resemblance to the inner part of a crashed aircraft. The pupils and the teaching staff cannot sit in the classrooms whenever dust-laden Sahelian storms raid the area from nearby Burkina Faso.
The schoolchildren usually are asked to go home anytime it is observed that a downpour is brewing in the skies. And with direct sunrays flooding the classrooms from the roofless top during lessons, there is little or nothing to teach or learn in the burning heat.
Some residents say the school is recording both low enrollment and poor attendance. They attribute the decline to parents and guardians withdrawing their wards from the school because of the state of that building.
The new schools the parents and the guardians send their wards to are more distant from home. But they feel the safety and the comfort of their wards are worth the daily long journeys and all other extra costs.
At times, teaching and learning materials are caught up in sudden raindrops and get destroyed as rain lashes the schoolchildren and their teachers out of the classrooms into any nearby shelter.
There is another block on the school premises. That building holds the head-teacher’s office and accommodates the pupils in primary five and six as well as those at the kindergarten level. Its roof is intact.
When the day is over, the schoolchildren who learn in the building with the devastated roof carry their furniture to the classroom block with the undamaged roof because of the unpredictable weather.
Then, the next day they carry the furniture back to their classrooms in the same manner. As the children lift the furniture every morning, some amount of the school contact hours is lost.
The school was established in 2009 and currently has 205 pupils under the care of 10 teachers.
With more than a decade of existence so far, the school should be saying cheers to a 16th anniversary at this time— not teaching and learning inside a building condemned to the jeers of high-risk neglect.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
