No roof, no hope? The struggles of students schooling under trees in northern Ghana

Yakubu Abdul-Rahman is special–an outright outlier.

He grew up and was schooled in Chaankpem, a village in the heart of the Nanton District in Ghana’s Northern Region.

His courageous climb up the educational ladder, which has currently ended up with him attending the University for Development Studies (UDS) – one of Ghana’s top universities – is nothing short of a miracle. It is a rare rise, and there is a riveting reason.

Unsurprisingly, his people back home adore him and are in awe of his audacious achievement.

Today, he recognizes what being a symbol of success for his kinsmen means: carrying the weight of enormous expectation.

But he remains resolute.

“It wasn’t easy,” young Yakubu tells The Fourth Estate.

The tenacious 24-year-old, who is pursuing a degree in Information Technology, has just finished a lecture on the campus of UDS.

He speaks in a quiet, shy manner.

“Growing up and schooling in Chaankpem wasn’t easy,” he adds. “I experienced a lot of difficulties.”

Yakubu recalls schooling under a shed where pupils had to sit on the ground or on kitchen stools, put their books on their laps or kneel to write, and how schooling had to end in Primary two.

We were 20 in class,” he says. “Six of us got to continue schooling in Savelugu, and out of the six, only two of us made it to Junior High School (JHS).”

Yakubu eventually made it to Senior High School (SHS) in Yendi, where he enjoyed the Free SHS policy by the government.

Except it wasn’t particularly enjoyment, neither was it totally free.

“I don’t think it is really Free SHS,” he says. “Yes, you don’t pay fees, but you end up spending much more on other school needs, especially in a school like mine, which is a boarding school.”

“Besides,” he continues, “the conditions under which Free SHS happens are really poor. The quality of education is low because of the numbers and the double-track system, the food is nothing to write home about, and it barely makes a difference, especially when the school suffers from inadequate facilities, resources, and teachers.”

Yakubu recognises that though he was able to endure and excel in a “difficult environment” in Chaankpem, the system heavily hinders many other children from making it, and the resulting lack of literacy affects the development of the community.

Life in Chaankpem

Yakubu is right.

The Fourth Estate team eventually drives to Chaankpem, which is about 25km away from the Northern Regional capital, Tamale, to experience the said “difficult educational environment”.

It’s just after 9 am on a rather sunny Tuesday morning in Chaankpem, and about five girls between the ages of seven and nine are in a donkey-powered carriage on their way to a location about a kilometer away from the village.

This location is not a school, where they really ought to be at this time, but a dam, where they apparently need to be.

They ride to the dam every morning to fetch water for their households.

Water is a major challenge here, and the dam, containing water that is miserably muddy, is their only source. They use this brown water for cooking, drinking, washing, and bathing.

There are two dams in Chaankpem – a new one and an old one.

The new one was built by the erstwhile NPP government as part of its “One Village One Dam (1V1D)” initiative.

It is evidently a glorified puddle that has been abandoned, a shocking representation of its estimated cost of between GHS 200,000 and 250,000, according to the then Minister for Special Development Initiatives, Mavis Hawa Koomson.

But that is not the point of this story.

Meanwhile, the girls fill their big barrel aboard the carriage with water and ride through the dry, dusty land back to the village.

They go home and get ready for school.

Schooling in Chaankpem

The school…is barely a school.

The kindergarten classes happen under a tree, while the primary one, two, and three classes are housed in a dingy and dilapidated two-room building.

This building does not even belong to the school. It was originally built as an ancillary facility to the community mosque. It was to serve as a space for Arabic studies (Makaranta), but has now been loaned to the school for regular studies.

Nafisa, Ahlam, Asana, and Mina are four of the girls who had earlier gone to the dam to fetch water. They are now in one of the classrooms.

“Our teachers teach us ABC and 123,” Mina smiles, speaking in Dagbani. Like all other pupils, she cannot speak English, though she is in Primary three, and though that is the language she is taught in.

Ahlam, meanwhile, proudly recites the alphabet from A to Z.

Asana, though, like almost two-thirds of the children here, is not in a uniform because she doesn’t have one. Her folks cannot afford one.

The shy Nafisa whispers something into the ears of Alhassan Fusseini.

“She says they are not comfortable with the conditions in the school,” Fusseini tells me.

Fusseini is the man taking us around the community and the school. He is a native of Nanton town, which is the capital of the Nanton district, but is a familiar face in Chaankpem, having spent most of his time here for the last two decades.

He lives in the neighboring Savelugu, where he is a morning show host on radio.

“I visit this place a lot,” Fusseini, 41, says. “Most of the time, after my show in the mornings, I hop onto my motorbike and visit here before I go to my farm.”

Fusseini is a people person in Chaankpem, attracting respect from women and admiration from men. “We’re virtually family, you know,” he says.

Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, education is the major challenge in Chaankpem and in the entire Nanton district at large.

“We are lagging behind in education, and that needs to change,” Fusseini says. “Duty bearers have tried their best, but still. The situation is dire, and it’s an issue people don’t like to talk about.”

School in Chaankpem ends at Primary three. From then, pupils would have to travel a long distance daily – about 12km on foot – to Savelugu to continue schooling.

Nurudeen Issahaku is one of only three teachers here. “We should have had up to primary six by now,” he complains.

School starts around 8 am, but due to routine lapses such as going to the dam – and sometimes, the farm – the harm is that it can start around 10 am.

There is a break around 1 pm for the pupils to go back home and eat. “Getting to noon, the pupils start complaining of hunger,” Issahaku says.

Sadly, they never return after the break, as their parents prefer to keep them at home for chores.

Chaankpem, like the entire Nanton district, is an agrarian community. The people are mostly farmers, majoring in crops such as maize, soya, groundnut and yam.

Parents here are not believers in the concept of education.  They prefer to orient their children and establish them in farming rather than send them to school.

“They always say ‘what is there to do after school? Look at so-so-and-so, he finished school and is at home’,” Fusseini says.

Issah Alhassan, the headmaster of the school in Chaankpem, says he had to go from house to house to convince parents to enroll their children in school. “We got about 24 pupils that day,” Alhassan says, proudly.

The pupils themselves struggle to grasp what they are taught, hampered by all of the challenges across infrastructure and culture. But the teachers are trying, and it is always a triumph when the pupils show signs of progress – although that is slow, if not rare.

“If I come and teach and I ask questions which they are able to answer, I feel so happy,” Alhassan says.

Over in Nyoligu-Botingli, a village a few kilometers from Chaankpem, the education situation is strikingly similar – a school either under a tree and a sorry structure, no place beyond Primary three, a handful of teachers, and struggling students.

In other schools, such as one in Guntingli, students lie in the dust to write in their books, Fusseini says.

This sad situation is prevalent in most schools in the Northern Region, and indeed is a phenomenon that exists in most rural communities in Ghana, and even in some urban ones.

Due to this, except they are a Yakubu, pupils from such communities barely break barriers towards eventually attaining prominent and productive careers that would enable them to give back.

The prevalence of schools under trees

In February 2025, new education minister Haruna Iddrisu, speaking at an education forum, revealed that there are about 5,000 schools under trees in Ghana, which he described as an “infrastructure deficit” in the country’s education aspirations.

But this number is an underestimation.

According to some Civil Society Organizations (CSO) such as Star Ghana, CAMFED, and Action Aid, there are over 5,400 schools under trees, sheds, and dilapidated structures across Ghana, especially in rural areas, which is “unacceptable”.

Data from education-focused CSO, Education Watch, says 80% of these schools are in the five regions of northern Ghana- Northern, Upper East, Upper West, North-East and Savannah regions.

Per a report by a coalition of these organizations, while the government in 2021 announced a program to replace all of such schools by this year (2025) by building classroom structures, only 17 are known to have been completed.

The report adds that given the current pace of work, it would take Ghana as many as 300 years to clear all schools under trees.

“That is somebody’s perspective, but I will say no,” Dr Peter Attafuah, senior education advisor at Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch) tells The Fourth Estate.

“If I were the one in government, I would use a year to do it. It is something within our means to do,” he adds confidently.

The deplorable state of basic education in Ghana hurts learning outcomes and, by extension, the literacy rate.

According to a report by the Ghana Statistical Service from September 2022, 7.9 million Ghanaians aged six years and above are illiterate – that is, they cannot read and write with understanding.

“When a child is in Primary three, he or she should be able to read and write,” Dr Attafuah says. “If they cannot, then there’s something wrong.”

Dr. Attafuah spent 34 years working under the Ghana Education Service (GES), rising through the ranks from being a teacher through to becoming regional education director in the Greater Accra Region, the former Brong Ahafo Region and the Northern Region, where he retired in 2022.

“The basic education level is very important,” he says. “Basic means beginning, and the beginning must be good. Without a solid foundation, you cannot transition to the next level.”

In 2023, education accounted for 10.9% of Ghana’s government expenditure. According to the 2023 UN Education Budget Brief for Ghana, this percentage is below the global benchmark of 15 to 20%, and the Ghanaian government’s own targeted commitment of 23%.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has described education as “the single most important investment that any country can make for its future and its people.”

Is Ghana doing enough of this investment?

“Not enough,” Dr Attafuah says. “We have done something, granted, but we are not there yet. We need to do more for basic education, especially. We need to concentrate on that level.”

“Education is the fulcrum on which all other ministries depend on,” Dr. Attafuah explains.

“Though health is key, we should give education more in terms of budget allocation. This is because if, through education, people are taught ways to keep themselves healthy, they would not even fall sick in the first place.”

“We must give all our attention to education,” he continues. “Education should be number one. If we do that, about 90% of the challenges we face as a nation will be cleared.”

Daring to hope

Back in Chaankpem, the pupils – about 30 of them in all – continue to hope against onerous odds.

They yearn to become like Yakubu, successfully sailing through the stages to the secondary and tertiary levels.

Maybe – just maybe – that might happen.

But given the conditions they are confronted with, one wonders if it might.