I speak a lot about work. This is because that’s what I do. My work is to work. As I said in Parliament when being approved as Minister, “I am here to do my job not to keep it.” This is what I meant by that on a typical day… how I spent my Friday.

1. Making phone calls- My day started with a 1hr 8am call with the UNESCO Assistant Director General for Education in prep for the UN Transforming Education Summit. Throughout the course of the day, I spoke with the UN Deputy Secretary General, the Special Adviser of the Secretary General, the head of UN Girls Education Initiative etc all on global education issues. I also called with the Minister of Finance, Minister of Health, Minister of Information, Minister of Gender, Anti Corruption Commissioner and many others… all on work! As Minister, making phone calls is work!

2. Meeting Technical Staff- I started day meeting my Chief Education Officer, and then the SL WAEC team to align on our priorities. I met with my Deputy Minister to talk on school feeding and teacher training. Then my head of Global Partnership for Education spoke for about an hour. In between, several staff popped in and out and shared documents with me for input. My work is to do technical work.

3. Meeting Civil Society and Media- today I held a Press Conference since Aug 20th is the 4 yr commemoration of the FQSE launched by President Bio. Incredible achievements (we will speak about these later) but it was awesome engaging over 20 media houses on critical issues in education. My work is to meet media.

4. Meeting students- some of my mentees dropped by my office and invited me to a program at the Scouts headquarters where some 50 other students were gathered. I walked over and spent an hour interacting with the students and answering their questions. We took pics after and spent time discussing ideas, myths and responsibilities. My work is to meet and learn from students.

5. Creating partnerships- I spent time with my friend Samzu who introduced the best ranked Chess Player to me today. We discussed the introduction of chess in Education and how it’s linked with our 5Cs: critical thinking, creativity, comprehension, computational thinking and Civics. Watch out for more here. Then I met with the Project Coordinator for the Skills Development Fund of MTHE to discuss some issues related to a school and ended up discussing the Fund and its impact. Again, amazing progress training some 21,000 young people skills over the last couple of years.

At 6:30pm when leaving, even my EA Grace Kargobai who maybe feels like we are robots said, we did a lot today. Yes, we did do a lot today and so many people in my Ministry do so so much. Thousands of school leaders are being trained in districts now; other teachers too are being trained and more. My team is impatient for change because