Getting better and better....

I try my best to be as fair as possible in my posts so today I am going to dwell on something I find commendable.The Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology in Ghana has initiated a new scholarship scheme to support students in the area of maths, science and technology studies.It is for both pre-tertiary and tertiary students studying any subject under the broad category.
The scholarship covers the tuition fees for the recipient for the academic year of the scholarship award.I think that this is a laudable initiative the ministry and government as a whole and needs to be commended.
However there are just a few basic issues that need to be sorted out with respect to the method of application.According to press releases from the ministry,a certain number of forms was made available to the district education offices all over the country.Interested applicants were to pick up the forms from the district offices and submit them back to them.However according to first hand information from the district directors of certain districts,they did not receive any forms.Some districts also received forms for only pre-tertiary students.Now the questions that beg asking include:
1.Do prospective applicants pick forms from their districts of origin or from the district in which their educational institutions are situated?
2.Are scholarships awarded based on merit only or district of origin only or both?
3.Are the scholarship quotas for each district the same or different?If they are the same, did the ministry take size,population,economic background and percentage of youth in school for each district into consideration?
4.Are children or direct dependents of ministry officials and district education officials qualified to receive this scholarship?
5.How was it that some districts did not receive the forms?
If someone has answers to these questions I would be very happy to hear them.For now it would seem that the scholarship forms were kept by some officials in the various district offices and given out to only their relatives and friends.
If this scholarship is to serve its purpose, some of these challenges need to be addressed.The Northern regions of Ghana have some of the most serious developmental issues in this country.The percentage of the populace educated up north is less than that for most of the southern regions, and yet a lot of districts in the north did not even receive the scholarship forms.If we are not interested in regions of origin of applicants,then the forms need to be made available online for easy access to anyone who is interested.
I hope that the administrators of this scholarship will sort out some of these issues before the forms are made available next year.