Minister for Education, Haruna Iddrisu, has announced that Ghana will host the 2nd High-Level Conference on Scaling Education Initiatives in Emergencies (ACCELERATE+) from September 29th to 30th, 2026, at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra.

Speaking ahead of the conference, the Minister said he deliberately announced the conference days in advance to turn it from a ceremony into a commitment.

"A conference that is announced on the morning it opens is a ceremony. A conference that is announced in advance with the country watching becomes a commitment. I want this one to be a commitment," he stated.

The conference will bring together Ministers of Education, researchers, innovators, financiers and regional bodies from across West Africa to answer four plain questions: “What works when a crisis closes a school? What does it take to spread what works beyond a pilot? Who pays for it? And how do we do this together as a region?”

Hon. Iddrisu painted a sobering global picture, noting that an estimated 72 million crisis-affected children are out of school while another 127 million are in classrooms but not attaining minimum learning outcomes because systems around them have been disrupted.

"That is a generation in two parts: one locked out, and one present but not learning," he said, adding that West Africa carries a heavy share of the burden due to insecurity across the Sahel that has emptied schools in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria.

The Minister was candid about Ghana's own vulnerabilities, saying it would be convenient to speak about emergencies as happening elsewhere but that is not true.

He, therefore, listed five fronts:

1. The March 2020 closure of all schools sent millions home for nearly a year. Radio and TV lessons left behind children without electricity, radio or smartphones, leading to dropouts, teenage pregnancies and learning losses still visible in literacy and numeracy results.

2.  Communities in North Tongu, Central Tongu, South Tongu and Ada were submerged, tens of thousands displaced. Schools went underwater or became shelters, with furniture, textbooks and records lost, yet affected children sat the same national examinations as peers in dry classrooms.

3.  In Keta, Anloga, Ketu South—Fuveme, Agavedzi, Salakope, Amutinu and elsewhere, the sea has taken homes and school buildings outright, a clear sign climate change is now an education problem.

4. Annual Bagre Dam spillage and seasonal floods across Upper East, North East, Northern, Savannah and Oti Regions cut off communities and keep children out of school for weeks.

5.  The situation in Bawku and other communal tensions have closed schools and driven teachers away, while illegal mining, economic shocks, and overcrowded classrooms continue to pull children out of learning.

"Every one of these events had the same effect: a child who should have been learning was not learning. And the cost of that is not paid in the year it happens. It is paid over a lifetime," the Minister said.

Hon. Iddrisu noted that Ghana has not been passive, expanding complementary and accelerated education, school feeding, girls' retention and teacher deployment with partners like School for Life, NNED, World Vision and others. 

"The distance between a proven innovation and a national programme is not a distance of knowledge; it is a distance of policy, financing and coordination. That is precisely the gap this conference exists to close," he stressed.

He therefore issued a direct call to researchers and universities “to bring evidence a Minister can act on—including cost and what would break at scale; to innovators to bring models including parts that failed; to development partners and financiers to come prepared to discuss instruments, not intentions; to colleague Ministers from Nigeria, Burkina Faso and across the region to co-sign a policy communique to the AU and ECOWAS; and to the media to report education in emergencies as a system story, not just a week-long disaster story”.

The two-day conference is expected to produce an evidence synthesis, a policy communiqué to the African Union and ECOWAS, a financing investment brief and a monitored roadmap with names and dates.

"A flood recedes. A dispute is eventually settled. A pandemic passes. But the year of schooling a child loses does not come back on its own; somebody must go and get it. That is what this conference is for," Hon. Iddrisu concluded.