Walk into a market in Kumasi and you will hear four languages inside a minute, none of them a barrier to trade. Walk into a classroom two streets away and language becomes the thing that decides who passes.
The gap between policy and practice
Ghana's language-in-education policy has changed direction several times in forty years. What has not changed is the reality that most teaching materials, most assessment and most teacher training sit in English.
What works elsewhere
Systems that handle multilingualism well tend to share three habits: they train teachers in the languages children actually speak, they assess understanding rather than only English fluency, and they treat a second language as something added rather than something substituted.
There is nothing exotic about any of that. It is ordinary pedagogy, applied honestly to the room the teacher is standing in.
