Search Page

11 university heads have been requested to file a detailed report on the financial and academic ability of the department or school within their institutions that trains PhD students. They are expected to provide details on how money disbursed by the state was used for PhD defense panels in the period 2020-21 and 2022-23. According to the Ministry’s guidelines, PhD applicants will be approved only if they have sufficient financial and academic means to carry out research projects.

An investigation found nearly 170 residents who allegedly defrauded subsidies from the Continuing Education Development Plan, which involved over MOP1 million. Between 2016 and 2019, two staff members attracted residents to apply to the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau for the Continuing Education Development Plan and apply for subsidised courses. The centre reported untrue attendance records and colluded with instructors and students to forge attendance records while the students received cash rebates amounting to half of the subsidies paid or took other courses held by the centre for free.

The President has ordered an audit of how public primary and secondary schools have spent the billions in free learning cash released to them across three years. Free Primary Education funds were first rolled out in 2003, with each child getting Sh1,020 per year. In 2014, the Jubilee government increased FPE to Sh1,420 to cater for an estimated enrolment of about 10 million children in about 23,000 public primary schools. Annually this costs Sh14 billion.

Sierra Leonean civil society activists are working to improve accountability. The National Accountability Group (NAG) – the local chapter of Transparency International – used a Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) to find out what had happened to school fee subsidies and learning materials designated for a sample of 28 schools in a rural district. NAG's survey came after an earlier Ministry of Finance PETS revealed startling figures about education corruption. In 2002 researchers found that 45.1 percent of the funds for school fees subsidies were unaccounted for and that nearly 28 percent of teaching and learning materials had disappeared.