The Ghana Library Authority, with funding support from the Commonwealth of Learning, has secured an additional 1,000 scholarships for its e-learning project dubbed ‘Read2Skill’ to make its total scholarship award 2,000.

Read2Skill was launched in January 2020 to offer only 1,000 scholarships to Ghanaians to study various courses on the world’s largest open-learning platform, Udemy.

The total number of scholarships acquired for the project makes Ghana’s total number of scholarships the largest among the four Commonwealth nations benefitting from the partnership.

Executive Director of the Ghana Library Authority, Mr Hayford Siaw, indicated that it had to seek additional scholarships due to the huge interest expressed by Ghanaians in the project.

“We received 31,574 applications from all 16 regions of Ghana as of the end of January, competing for just 1,000 scholarship slots. If we had not negotiated for more, then, clearly you can see that many Ghanaians would be denied access to this opportunity and, so, what we did was to engage our partners to extend the opportunity for more Ghanaians”, Mr Siaw said.

He noted that the Authority is not accepting new applications, adding that the additional 1,000 scholarships secured will be given to applicants who were not selected to be part of the initial 1,000 but sent their applications by the deadline.

Among the applications received from all the 16 regions, the Greater Accra recorded the highest number of applications, with 13,895 applicants while the Savanna Region recorded the lowest – 106.

Also, statistics indicate that more males applied for the e-learning programme compared to females while in the Greater Accra Region, for instance, 9295 out of 13,895 applicants were males and the remaining 4,600 were females.

Project Management and Operations was chosen as the most-preferred course by applicants on the Udemy learning platform while Procurement was the least-preferred.

Successful candidates will be given certificates upon completion of any of the courses available. They have till the end of October 2020 to enroll on as many courses as possible.

The courses available on the Read2Skill programme include but not limited to Data Science, Cloud Computing, Project Management, IT Operations, Design, Finance and Accounting, Human Resource, Leadership and Management and Office Productivity.