The Catholic Church role in formal education provision in Northern Region of Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Catholic Church’s role in formal education in Ghana remains largely undocumented. This study analyzed the Catholic Church's contributions to formal education in Northern Ghana. Using a mixed-methods approach with integrated qualitative and quantitative methodologies, we explored the role of Tamale’s Catholic Church of the Archdiocese in formal education provision in Ghana's Northern Region. The qualitative component used a case study approach, focusing on Catholic Church educational initiatives in the Tamale Archdiocese, while the quantitative component employed a cross-sectional survey to capture broader trends among educational stakeholders. The study population comprised religious orders of the Catholic Church, education directors, head teachers, circuit supervisors, NGO representatives, Parent-Teacher Associations, and student alumni. Purposive and convenience sampling were used for qualitative data, whereas multistage sampling selected 385 respondents for the quantitative component. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and structured questionnaires. Thematic analysis was conducted using the Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) Miner Lite software (v.3.0) for qualitative data, and descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed using SPSS for quantitative data. The findings showed that the Catholic Church served as a significant contributor to formal education, with substantial roles in establishing schools, managing institutions, monitoring academic activities, training staff, participating in educational policy advocacy, and providing teaching resources. This study highlights the Catholic Church as a critical stakeholder in Northern Ghana's educational development, with contributions spanning foundational, managerial, and advocacy dimensions. Based on these findings, we recommend collaboration between churches and the government to ensure equitable resource distribution, targeted capacity-building programmes, and formalised partnerships in educational policy implementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".