Reverend John Ntim Fordjour, Deputy Minister of Education, has commended the management of Buck Press Limited, a printing company, for completing the printing of the basic science textbooks ahead of schedule.
The Minister said the company was given 120 days, from June to September, 2022 to print the textbooks, but used 30 days to get the work done, representing over 50 per cent of the textbooks being supplied to the schools.
Rev Fordjour said this on Friday in Accra when he paid a courtesy call on the management of the company to ascertain the progress of work.
Buck Press Limited is one of the printing companies contracted by the Government to print basic science textbooks in the country to be distributed in Eastern, Ashanti and Bono regions.
The Company has so far distributed 123,000 textbooks to the various schools in the regions, hoping by the close of the day Friday, an additional 173,827 textbooks would be supplied to the regions.
Rev Fordjour said it was the commitment of the Government and the Ministry of Education to ensure that, following the reform of the country’s new standard-based curriculum, all the textbooks were ready for effective teaching and learning.
He reiterated President Akufo-Addo’s policy to ensure improvement in education, and therefore, the urgent need for textbooks to be made readily available for all basic schools throughout the country
He said the Ministry engaged local printers and publishers to print the textbooks, ahead of foreign companies because of the Government’s confidence in local content.
The Minister expressed satisfaction at the pace of work, stressing that the work of the local printers had saved 50 per cent of the country’s revenue compared to the foreign printers.
“Buck press is one of the indigenous Ghanaian printing companies which have been engaged to assist the government in the printing of the textbooks. They are printing for two publishers-York Press and Sub-Sahara Publisher.
“So far, we are satisfied with what they have done and hope within the few days, all the textbooks will be distributed across the country,” he said.
He said the printing of the textbooks had been delayed because the Government had to ensure that quality assurance was adhered to avoid errors on the content of the books.
“We do not want a situation where books that will be purchased with the precious taxpayers money will get into classrooms with mistakes in some pages, so a quality assurance process has to be undertaken,” he said.
Mr Francis Nyanin, the Executive Director, Buck Press, said the company had the capacity to deliver on the task assigned them saying “we have printed and delivered 60 per cent of the project”
He was confident that the company would finish all the production of the textbooks before the deadline because of the huge investment made on the state-of-the-art equipment.
Currently, five local printers-G-PAK Limited, a subsidiary of the Graphic Communications Group Limited; the Buck Press, Appointed Time Printing Limited, Jay Kay Industries Ltd and Sec-print Limited were engaged in printing the textbooks.
