Contributions of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) towards the consolidation of grassroots democracy in Ghana: A review of strategies and topical issues

The scope of civic engagement has expanded to cover many more forms of participation, like community involvement, as well as highlighting the relevance of unconventional civic actions such as demonstrations and protests. It has been established that the multi-dimensional understanding of civic engagements must reshape how we understand, investigate, and practice civic education in the political space. The extant literature has been preoccupied with theoretical and empirical discourse on the existence and relevants of civic education institutions, as well as focused on questions like; what are the benefits of keeping an educated or well-informed citizenry? And what are the possible threats posed by civic ignorance and apathy among the citizenry? Howbeit, the systematic studies on establishing the key methodologies employ by these civic education institutions are somewhat few. In the Ghanaian context, citizens have expressed mixed feelings on the need for the creation and operation of the National Commission for Civic Education. To help fill the knowledge gap, this current study sought to ascertain the predominant methods utilized by the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) in providing civic education to the general public as well as to investigate the topical issues that dominate their discourse in Ghana. The study adopted the descriptive research design and the use of a survey instrument to collect quantitative data from 145 sampled respondents, selected with the multi-stage probability sampling technique. Data was handled quantitatively using the IBM SPSS version 21. The study established that the NCCE utilizes diverse civic education methods in reaching-out to the people of Ghana, of which, the use of the community information centers and the in-person visitation of places of worship by its officials, dominate. It again found that political issues comprising voter education, education on the provisions of the 1992 Constitution, fundamental human rights as well as political participation, respectively, dominate the discussions of the NCCE in Ghana. These findings serve as empirical guide to the officials of the NCCE to effectively utilize variety of methods to intensify its civic education, especially, the use of the internet and social media. It also to a larger extent, guide the NCCE to collaborate effectively with other institutions like the mass media, religious bodies and the school in the provision of civic education in Ghana. Since majority of the people receive civic education through the mass media outlets, a further qualitative research should be conducted to understand how the NCCE can effectively collaborate with the mass media to consolidate Ghana’s democratic gains at the local level.