A Bit About Education: The University of Legon

This Saturday we took a little trip to Legon, The University of Ghana. Legon is not too far from Accra, after you have got through the usual traffic jam (it`s crazy, I think I have already been in more traffic jam here, then ever at home) an d actually left Accra, it only takes about 20 minutes to get there in a trotro. Well, Legon is the oldest (it was founded in 1948) and the biggest university of Ghana and probably also West Africa. It`s one of the few public universities in Ghana – since most of the universities are private, which also means that they charge really high fees from the students. Education is absolutely not cheep here – already starting from nursery, the children can pay hundreds of Ghanaian cedis (1 USD ₌ 1,5 Cedis) as school fees. Since university is also very expensive, lots of people choose at first teaching at schools (for which you don`t need any degree apart from the highschool) to save up some money for university. Also, unfortunately most people see teaching as a temporary state for making a living and not too many consider it as an actual carrier.By the way, getting a job after completing university is not exactly granted here, either - in fact it all works very similarly to the European process: having relatives / friends at a certain workplace helps a lot in getting a certain job there.

Anyway, getting back to the University of Legon, it`s really-really beautiful, a lot of European universities could be envy of it, really! And it`s really huge, too! We had about two hours there which was hardly enough to walk around half of the territory, which includes the lecture halls, the dormitories (there are common dormitories and also dormitories just for men and women), a huge library, an open theater, a lot of beautiful green area, even with a fountain in it, as well as a huge botanic garden. There`s a lot of open space where the students can hang around during their freetime, although right now since we visited the place on Saturday, it wasn`t too crowded. Well, my whole impression about the place was that it`s a very friendly university that besides its nice outlook also provides great facilities for the students to spend their time together.