Stability and Change: Multi-Streams and Ideational Explanation of Free Senior Secondary Education Programme Adoption in Ghana

After decades of implementing neoliberal-induced cost-sharing senior secondary education
policies, Ghana introduced comprehensively free universal education (FSHS) in 2017. Although
much has been written about the FSHS, little is known about how the issue of education
access rose to the status of a national problem requiring a major policy shift. We combine
insights from Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework with ideational perspectives to
investigate and explain the political factors and the agenda-setting dynamics that led to the
paradigmatic shift in high school financing in Ghana. This article draws upon elite interviews
with government officials, members of parliament, former ministers, donors, CSOs, teachers,
parents’ associations, and education experts, as well as extensive documentary reviews,
including parliamentary Hansards and media publications. We find that a change in
government in 2016, the first time an incumbent President had lost power to an opposition
candidate since the return to democratic rule in 1992, created a “policy window” for the NPP
government to implement free high-school education. This was aided by the rise of new policy
entrepreneurs with political commitments and the institutional leverage to provide a solution
to an existing policy problem, and financial capacity from Ghana’s status as a new oil-
producing country. We challenge reductionist accounts which suggest that the main enabler
for the adoption of universal social policies in developing countries, including
comprehensively free education, is electoral incentive to win political power. We contend that
such readings fail to recognise the role of coupling of the problem, policy and politics streams
in the agenda-setting and adoption process and the increasing relevance of ideas in shaping
the worldviews and incentives of political and policy elites. The paper makes an important
contribution to the literature on universal social policy adoption and highlights possible
pathways for achieving the sustainable development goal of leaving no one behind