The controversy surrounding unpaid scholarships for Ghanaian students in the United Kingdom has opened another question: does a Government of Ghana scholarship for study abroad include financial support for a beneficiary’s spouse and children?
The question follows allegations by Ghana’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Sabah Zita Benson, that documents available to her show instances where scholarship support went beyond the student and covered dependants.
In an interview, Benson referred to a case in which a woman studying abroad was allegedly supported alongside her husband and three children. She said the state paid for travel and allowances for the dependants and claimed there were other cases involving scholars travelling with several children and spouses at the taxpayer’s expense.
She argues that these are some of the expenditures that must be examined as government deals with accumulated scholarship liabilities and demands from students for unpaid tuition and stipends.
But does paying for a scholar’s spouse or children automatically make the expenditure illegal?
The answer is not that straightforward.
For most of its existence, the Ghana Scholarships Secretariat operated without a dedicated Act of Parliament governing how government scholarships are to be administered. The institution traces its establishment to 1960, while the current Ghana Scholarships Authority Act only came into existence in 2025. The new Authority describes Act 1149 as providing a single public mandate for the transparent administration of government scholarships.
This is significant because most of the dependant payments currently being questioned were allegedly approved under the old Scholarships Secretariat system, before Act 1149 existed.
Under that old arrangement, scholarship packages could differ depending on the particular programme, bilateral arrangement, award terms or administrative approval.
Therefore, the mere fact that a spouse or child received support does not, by itself, establish that somebody broke the law.
The critical question is what authorised the payment.
If an approved scholarship agreement, programme policy or award letter expressly provided a dependant allowance, and the appropriate public officers properly authorised the expenditure, then the fact that the beneficiary’s spouse or children received money would not automatically make the payment illegal.
However, if there was no policy or agreement allowing such benefits, and officials nevertheless committed public funds to paying for spouses or children, the issue becomes one of whether those officials had the legal and financial authority to make those payments.
That distinction is important.
Parliament introduced the Ghana Scholarships Authority Bill on June 24, 2025, with Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu sponsoring the legislation. Parliament subsequently passed the Bill as part of an effort to strengthen transparency, oversight and accountability in scholarship administration.
The resulting Ghana Scholarships Authority Act, 2025 — Act 1149 — was dated December 2, 2025.
The law now provides a clearer statutory framework for administering government scholarships. The Authority itself describes its mandate as awarding scholarships to deserving Ghanaians and coordinating local and foreign scholarship support through a transparent system.
What is particularly important to the current controversy is that Act 1149 does not expressly establish a general entitlement for a beneficiary’s spouse or children to receive scholarship benefits.
There is no automatic provision in the Act saying that because a Ghanaian has received a scholarship abroad, the state must also pay the living expenses, airfare or other costs of the beneficiary’s husband, wife or children.
That does not, however, allow Act 1149 to be applied in retrospect to automatically declare earlier dependant payments illegal.
The disputed awards must be judged primarily against the rules, contractual terms and financial approvals that existed when those awards were made.
This means the investigation cannot end with the question: “Where in Act 1149 does it say government can pay spouses?”
For awards made before December 2025, the more relevant question is:
What document gave the Scholarships Secretariat authority to pay those spouses and children at the time?
That document could be an individual scholarship award letter, an approved scholarship policy, a bilateral agreement with another government or institution, an internal administrative approval or another legally recognised arrangement.
There is also the question of public financial management.
Even when an institution does not have a dedicated enabling Act, officers spending state money are still required to operate within Ghana’s wider public-finance framework. Public money cannot simply be committed because an official considers an expenditure desirable. There must be authority for the commitment and a proper approval process.
So if investigators establish that dependant payments had no underlying scholarship provision, no approved policy and no proper financial authorisation, the payments could amount to financial irregularities and potentially unlawful expenditure.
But that conclusion requires evidence.
It is also important to separate the responsibility of officials from that of beneficiaries.
A student who receives an official scholarship letter stating that a spouse or child is entitled to an allowance has not necessarily committed wrongdoing simply by accepting the benefit. Investigators would have to establish whether the beneficiary supplied false information, manipulated the process or knowingly received money outside the terms of the award before criminal responsibility could fairly be attributed to that person.
The same principle applies to the family members.
The fact that a spouse or children accompanied a student abroad is not the central issue. The real accountability question is why the Ghanaian state paid for them and what authority permitted that expenditure.
This is where the allegations by Sabah Zita Benson become significant.
She is essentially questioning whether some of the benefits found in old scholarship records were reasonable and properly authorised, particularly at a time when other Ghanaian students were accumulating unpaid tuition and stipend claims. Her assertion that these payments contributed to the financial difficulties confronting the scholarship system remains an allegation that would require the accounts and payment records to establish conclusively.
So, does Ghana’s study-abroad scholarship scheme cover spouses and children?
Under the current Ghana Scholarships Authority Act, there is no general statutory entitlement granting scholarship benefits to a beneficiary’s spouse or children.
For scholarships awarded under the old Secretariat, however, the answer depends on the terms governing each award.
And that means the central question is not simply whether spouses and children received taxpayers’ money.
It is:
Who approved the benefit, under what policy or agreement, how much was paid, and did the person approving it have the authority to commit public funds?
Until those documents are produced and examined, it would be inaccurate to declare all historic spouse and child payments illegal.
What can be said is that if no valid policy, scholarship agreement or financial authorisation existed to support those payments, then they would raise serious questions of financial irregularity and possible unlawful expenditure.
That paper trail — from the award letter, to the approval memo, to the payment authorisation — will ultimately determine whether Ghana was legitimately honouring the terms of a scholarship or improperly using public money to support entire families abroad.
By Wisdom Sarfo
