Holy Cross Education in Ghana

Historically, Ghanaian education has been offered along two parallel tracks: informal and formal education. Informal education took place in apprenticeship agreements with crafts and trades people. Formal education began with “castle schools” set up in slave forts for the children of colonizers and the African women who bore them. Later, missionary schools provided other models.

In the early 1970s the Ghanaian government established a national system that tried to provide not only academic preparation for higher learning but vocational training for those students inclined toward the trades rather than the professions.

As in other impoverished countries, in Africa and elsewhere, schools were built, children would come, but inadequate funding and infrastructure considerations made equipment, good teachers, even textbooks and instructional materials scarce. With little to work with in the classroom, the dropout rate among both students and qualified teachers soared.

Holy Cross sisters were invited to Ghana in 1983 by the Holy Cross brothers to complete the family of Holy Cross in that country and enter into collaboration with them in their pioneer efforts, since 1957, to bring Holy Cross education to Ghana.

Initially, the sisters assumed responsibility for religious education programs through the Diocesan Department of Religious Education in the Western Region.

In the early 1990s Ghanaian Sisters Margaret Mary Nimo and Esther Adjoa Entsiwah entered the congregation and as teachers in the state-operated public school system, they brought Holy Cross values to their students and classroom settings.

However, after working two years in the public school system, Sister Margaret Mary realized how difficult it was to change a system where classroom resources, system values and teacher qualifications were not equal to achieving the Holy Cross vision of the education of the “whole person.” She dreamed of a Holy Cross-sponsored school that would provide a model for her country and effect much-needed positive change in the lives of Ghanaian youth.

Our Lady of Holy Cross School began in 2006 as a pilot pre-school project in a small rented house in Kasoa with 14 students ranging in age from 2 to 4 years. In September 2007, the sisters moved the school from the rented house to the convent in Oduponkpehe, which is located about five kilometers southwest of Kasoa. Now a nursery, kindergarten and primary school, Our Lady of Holy Cross has since grown to 150 students, ages 18 months to 8 years. To accommodate this growth, the sisters constructed a new building in 2008 that eventually will be developed into a full primary and junior high school, one grade at a time.

Children in Ghana value education. Hopefully, the education received at Our Lady of Holy Cross School will liberate these children and their families from the cycle of poverty they have experienced for years.

~Adapted in 2009 by Sister Madeline Therese Wilhoit, CSC, from a report by Sisters Margaret Mary Nimo, CSC, and Esther Adjoa Entsiwah, CSC