Government workers in Ghana are generally required to retire at age sixty. Age sixty is hardly an age to put one’s self out of commission, especially as it may concern early childhood education service provision. Ghanaian educators need to be capacitated so they may extend their professional lives beyond the retirement age of sixty. Being in service to foundational learning and childhood development above-and-beyond a somewhat unnecessary finish line, especially when education service to children remains unreplenished, requires that fresh thinking should be applied to this national conundrum.
Many Ghanaians flirt with commercial activity even whilst employed ‘professionally’ in another occupation. One of the most common types of business activity involves the operation of` a shop that sells staples such as candies, diapers, beverages, plastic bags and mobile phone scratch cards. All-too-many a near-retiring educator, it appears, has this very same entrepreneurial flirtation in mind. The prevalence of this predilection for business needs to be ascertained, to be quantified.
Beyond this quantification and identification, there needs to be a nationwide drive to recruit business-aspiring educator-retirees to take up the challenge of providing private sector early childhood education services. These retirees’ long-accumulated experiences require reinvention for the sake of Ghana’s children, rather than they wasting their yet still productive years on petty trading.
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