Math Students in Ghana Face Difficult Social and Educational Realities

By: Jenny Brown

November 8, 2011

There are about 1,200 students in the undergraduate mathematics program at University of Ghana (two of which are exchange students), which translates to roughly one in 35 students on campus. The head of the department and only foreigner or woman on its faculty, Professor McIntyre, sat down with me to talk about some the difficulties and realities facing math students in Ghana.

In the Georgetown mathematics department, discussion over problems sometimes evolves into passionate debate, and classes are regularly interrupted when someone wants clarification or justification of a concept.

At the University of Ghana, math is much quieter. Even in my quantum mechanics class, a class of three students on one of the most confusing, non-intuitive, and complex fields of math or physics, we barely dare to tell the professor when he’s made a computational error.

Part of the problem is the lecture style: the professor copies from their notes onto the board, and we will copy this into our notebooks. This is partly a carryover from when textbooks were hard or impossible to come by in West Africa, and online resources were non-existent. The only study material students had was their in-class notes. Even though students can now get textbooks photocopied cover-to-cover and bound for $2 to $4 USD or buy Indian-published paperbound textbooks, which run around $6 to $10 USD, most classes don’t have set textbooks, and the old style has stuck around.

The threat of public humiliation also holds back class discussion. Lecturers regularly ridicule and mock students who speak out, so students learn to keep quiet. I was laughed at in front of 100 students in a philosophy class and told that my understanding of ethics was shallow, at best, for suggesting that chaos theory might be relevant to moral accountability.

In addition, English is a second or third language for most students. They’ve gone through their school career speaking English, but they rarely use it outside of class or when speaking with each other. Not all the students are comfortable talking about all the nuances and complexities of advanced mathematics in a foreign language, but their native languages don’t have the relevant vocabulary.

So, students do not learn how to discuss mathematics, a crucial skill in graduate school and beyond. While there is some movement towards teaching in students' native languages, setting the national curriculum in anything other than English would advantage one group over another and is in general a divisive issue.

After graduating from a public university Ghanaians must spend a year doing national service, and where they spend it has a major impact on their career paths. The math departments benefit greatly from its national service teaching assistants. Even in Ghana, the $30 USD monthly stipend barely pays for food and cell phone minutes, and since the university doesn’t offer housing or funding to the national service workers, teach assistants occasionally live on the streets or in cots in their department during their service.

In general, funding for graduate students is difficult to find. The university gives out scholarships to two to three of the few thousand graduate students every year, and the department sometimes receives grants from charities or corporations for a few of their students, but many graduate students end up taking on jobs to support themselves.

Funding for graduate studies and research is an issue in the United States too, but graduate students in Ghana also contend with a strong obligation to family. Ghanaian households tend to be quite large, and the line between nuclear and extended family is faint or non-existent. As such, Ghanaians—especially those few who get to attend university—are expected to provide for their younger siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews. So, not finding a paying job after college is sometimes seen as a shirking of one’s family obligations.

Despite all this, the number of Ph.D.s in the department is on the rise. The older members of the faculty all earned their graduate degrees in Europe, though more and more of the younger faculty members studied at University of Ghana. All of the students I’ve interacted with have been intelligent, hard-working, and creative.

Personally, I feel one of the larger obstructions to mathematics research and education in Ghana, possibly in developing countries in general, is a lack of visibility. Many people were surprised to hear that the University of Ghana had a large mathematics program, including advisors from the Georgetown office of international programs and math department. I hope that studying here has helped the issue in some small way.

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