Accra, July 13 (IANS) A global charity initiative has been supporting the government of Ghana in increasing school enrollment for children across the country, an official said Friday.

With support from other partners, the Ghana chapter of Plan International (Plan International Ghana), a child and gender-based charity, has been running a five-year program to promote school enrollment in poor and deprived communities, its Country Director Solomon Tesfamariam said.

The Reaching and Teaching Out of School Children is a five-year program spanning from 2015 to 2020, aiming to enroll 90,000 out-of-school children from five regions, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The project advocates that partners at the national and district levels urgently address a lack of schools in communities where there were none.

Available data indicate that Ghana's school enrollment rate stood at 84 per cent by 2013.

"The project will enroll boys and girls in the beneficiary regions through the Complementary Basic Education, and transition 70 per cent of the graduates to formal primary schools," Tesfamariam said at the One Day West African Corporate Social Responsibility Conference.

He said the program ultimately aims at ensuring universal school enrollment in the West African country where education accounts for about 23 per cent of annual state expenditure.

--IANS rs