The Extent to which Ghana’s Laws Comply with International Law to Protect Children’s Right to Education: Towards Harmonisation of Law and Culture
Daffeh, Lamin Filijeh (2025) The Extent to which Ghana’s Laws Comply with International Law to Protect Children’s Right to Education: Towards Harmonisation of Law and Culture. Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.
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Abstract
This study evaluates the extent to which Ghana’s laws comply with international law to protect the right to education. The study explores factors that create dichotomies in Ghana’s government’s ability to effectively protect the right to education as established by international law. Thus, barriers to education could be attributed to Ghana’s non-compliance with international law, which impedes the implementation and enforcement of children’s right to education in Ghana. The study finds that although poverty is a contributory factor towards the lack of education in Ghana. However, poverty is not the main factor that hinders the right to education in Ghana.
Instead, this research uncovers two additional factors that hinder children’s rights to education: legislative inefficacy and parents' cultural beliefs. The literature review reveals no lack of domestic, regional, and international legal and policy commitments in Ghana about children’s right to education. However, the proliferation of local and international human rights instruments within the Ghanaian legal firmament has not yielded the desired real-world literacy impact on attaining the right to education for all children in Ghana.
Adopting a desk-based research approach and employing the doctrinal research method, this study critically examines the Ghanaian legal system and cultural practices. It juxtaposes them with the normative standards of international law regarding the right to education. International standards are used as an interpretive lens to identify examples of national non-compliance. Using these examples, the research recommends improving national standards and the utility of the international mechanisms for preserving the right to education in Ghana.
It argues that beyond the paper commitment to children’s rights to education, the Government of Ghana should show sincere legal and political will towards children’s rights to education and ensure that cultural practices that impede the rights to education are addressed, ensuring harmonisation with the human rights instruments and culture, to protect the children’s rights to education.
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