Ghana's Inflation Rate Is 5%. Your Diesel Bill Just Went Up 18% in One Pricing Window.

One thing we hear every August: "inflation is only around 5%, so we're raising fees 5%." It sounds careful. It is also almost certainly wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that costs the school money for the next twelve months, not the parent.

The headline inflation number is a national average basket — food, rent, transport, everything, weighted the way a typical household spends. A school's basket is not that basket. Fuel floors jumped 18% in a single pricing window this month, and transport and fuel are exactly where a school's costs concentrate: buses, generators, staff commute support. Services inflation has been running close to double the rate of goods inflation for months. And the cedi has been the weakest of the major currencies tracked in the region this year, which matters directly if any of your ICT equipment, generators, textbooks, or software are priced in dollars, because the invoice doesn't care what the CPI says.

Anchor a fee increase to "inflation is 5%" and you have just locked in a shortfall on every one of those lines for a full academic year, discovered only when the bills actually arrive.

The four-line fee-setting method

Before you set next year's fee, build it from your own basket, not the news:

1. Salaries — your largest line, priced on its own terms. Whatever raise you're giving staff this year, that percentage belongs in the fee model directly, not folded into a general bump.

2. Transport and fuel — its own line, not a rounding error. This is the line moving fastest right now. Use the actual litres your buses and generators burn in a term, at today's pump price, not last year's.

3. Food — priced from your own supplier's current quote, not an assumption. Ask your caterer or supplier for this term's number before you finalise anything; food inflation moves in its own cycle, separate from fuel.

4. Anything priced in dollars — converted at today's rate, not the rate you budgeted last year. Software, generators, imported textbooks, ICT — the cedi cost of a fixed dollar price has been rising even in months the inflation headline looked calm.

Add the four, and you have a fee grounded in what your school actually spends, not in a number that describes someone else's household.

Why this is the correction worth making

The CPI is a real, useful number for the country. It is simply not built to answer the one question a proprietor is asking in August: what will it cost me to run this school for the next year? A school's cost structure is concentrated in exactly the categories — services, fuel, imports — that have been moving fastest, which means the gap between "inflation" and "my actual costs" isn't a rounding error, it's the whole story.

This isn't an argument for raising fees aggressively. A school that does this arithmetic honestly might find some lines flat and others sharp, and land on an increase smaller than 5% in one place and larger in another. The point isn't the number going up — it's that the number should come from your own four lines, not a headline that was never describing your school in the first place.

Do this arithmetic once, properly, in August, and you won't be doing it again in panic in January when the shortfall shows up as a cash problem instead of a pricing decision.