Yaw Opoku Mensah, spokesperson for former Education Minister Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, has publicly challenged Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu’s recent remarks that the Ghana Education Service (GES) still relies on manual data entry. Mensah insists that several digital platforms were introduced under the previous administration and are now being abandoned.
According to Mensah, GES began a digital transformation drive in 2017, launching a suite of systems including the GES Recruitment and Promotions platforms, Smart Workplace, the Self‑Placement Recruitment Platform and the Ghana Education Service Management Information System (GESMIS). These tools were designed to cut paperwork, improve data management and speed up administrative processes.
In a press release, Mensah argued that the real issue is not the lack of digital systems but the discontinuation of platforms that had already been developed and deployed. He highlighted that the recruitment and promotions platforms streamlined staff administration, reducing delays and repeated requests for supporting documents.
He also cited the Self‑Placement Recruitment Platform, introduced in 2024, which enabled more than 12,000 newly recruited teachers to print appointment letters online in under four hours, giving teachers greater choice in posting locations.
Smart Workplace, another reform, digitised memos and correspondence at GES headquarters, while GESMIS was intended to improve data collection from schools to headquarters, reducing manual entry and supporting decision‑making. Dr Osei Adutwum officially launched GESMIS in 2024 as part of the reforms to strengthen efficiency, transparency and accountability.
Mensah’s statement calls for the restoration, sustained use and further improvement of these existing systems, noting that their discontinuation has brought back the administrative burdens they were meant to eliminate. The immediate task, he says, is to determine why these platforms were halted and to reinstate them.
What follows is a debate over whether GES’s digital journey has truly begun or merely paused, and how the current ministry will address the gap between policy and practice.
