Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has mounted a strong defence of the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) policy, describing it as the most consequential social intervention in Ghana’s Fourth Republic.
Speaking at the Young Commons Forum at the University of Cape Coast on Saturday, the Effutu MP argued that despite sustained public debate and criticism, the programme’s expansion of access to secondary education remains unmatched in scope and impact.
According to him, the policy fundamentally reshaped Ghana’s educational landscape by removing cost barriers that had long prevented students from low-income households from progressing beyond junior high school.
“The critics can be loud,” he said, “but by far, without argument, Free SHS stands as the most emblematic social intervention of the Akufo-Addo administration — and indeed the most consequential in the Fourth Republic.”
The Free SHS initiative was rolled out in 2017 under former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo shortly after he assumed office. It formed a central pillar of his government’s pledge to reduce inequality in education and strengthen the country’s human capital base.
Afenyo-Markin maintained that the programme’s legacy lies in the thousands of students who have gained access to senior high school without the burden of tuition fees — a shift he believes has permanently altered educational participation patterns nationwide.
While acknowledging that public policies inevitably attract scrutiny, he insisted that the scale, reach and social mobility created by Free SHS make it one of the most defining initiatives of the past decade.
