7 female Colleges of Education in Ghana and the history behind them

• Ghana has seven female Colleges of Education with histories rooted in the expansion of women’s education and teacher training.

• Some, including Agogo, Aburi, and St. Teresa’s, briefly admitted male students before returning to female-only education.

• The colleges have played an important role in training generations of women teachers across Ghana.

While most Colleges of Education in Ghana admit both male and female students, a few institutions have maintained a different tradition.

These colleges were established at different points in Ghana’s educational history, with many of them created by missionary organisations to expand education for girls and train women to become teachers.

Some have remained female-only since their establishment, while others briefly admitted male students before returning to their original structure.

Here are seven female-only Colleges of Education in Ghana and the stories behind their history.

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Agogo Presbyterian Women’s College of Education in the Ashanti Region traces its origins to a girls’ boarding school established by the Basel Mission in 1931.

The school gradually developed into a teacher-training institution, and in 1950 the Presbyterian Church took over and renamed it Agogo Presbyterian Women’s Training College.

Interestingly, the college once experimented with co-education. In 1976, it admitted 10 male students and temporarily dropped “Women’s” from its name. However, the arrangement could not be sustained because of accommodation challenges, and the college eventually returned to being a single-sex institution.

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The Presbyterian Women’s College of Education at Aburi has an even older connection to girls’ education.

The Basel Mission established a girls’ boarding school at Aburi in 1858. Teacher training developed from this educational work, and in 1928 the colonial government officially approved a two-year teacher-training course specifically for women.

Aburi also tried co-education in the 1960s, admitting male students in 1961 and 1962. The experiment was later discontinued, with the college citing inadequate facilities and disciplinary challenges.

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OLA College of Education in Cape Coast was established in 1924 by the Catholic Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles.

The college was created partly because the sisters needed trained Ghanaian women to teach in their elementary schools. It began with just six students and has since developed into a degree-awarding institution.

OLA continues to identify itself as an all-female College of Education and describes itself as the first all-female College of Education in sub-Saharan Africa.

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St. Monica’s College of Education in Mampong, Ashanti Region, was established following a request by Asantehene Nana Agyemang Prempeh I for an institution of higher learning for women in Ashanti.

The institution opened in Cape Coast in 1930 before moving to Mampong in 1936. Today, it remains a female institution and describes itself as Ghana’s only female Anglican College of Education.

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St. Louis College of Education in Kumasi was established on September 23, 1960, by the Catholic Diocese of Kumasi.

According to the college's official history, it was established as the female counterpart of St. Joseph's Training College in Bechem, which had been founded to train male teachers.

St. Louis was therefore created specifically in the interest of girl-child education and to promote gender balance in teacher training.

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St. Teresa’s College of Education in Hohoe was established in 1961 with 35 students. It was originally called Women’s Training College and was specifically founded as a Catholic teacher-training institution for women.

The college later admitted male students when its teacher-training programme was reintroduced in 1977, but eventually returned to its original female-only structure in the 1990/91 academic year.

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Holy Child College of Education in Takoradi was established in 1946 and has remained associated with the training of women teachers.

The college began in Cape Coast before moving to its present location in Takoradi. It is currently an all-female College of Education and has produced generations of women who have gone into teaching and other educational roles.

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The histories of these institutions reflect a period when expanding girls’ education was an important part of Ghana’s educational development.

Missionary organisations established schools specifically for girls and, in several cases, created teacher-training programmes to produce women educators. For some institutions, the female-only structure was therefore part of their founding mission rather than a decision made recently.

The histories of Agogo, Aburi, and St. Teresa’s also show that some colleges experimented with admitting men but eventually returned to female-only education.

Today, these seven institutions remain an important part of Ghana’s teacher-training history, preserving a tradition that began when providing women with access to professional education was still a relatively new development.

You can read more on the school's official website.