Charter or shut down - GTEC to private tertiary institutions
Tertiary institutions that don't adhere to the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) directive to charter will be forced to close down upon expiration of the application window at the end of August this year.
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The GTEC said it had received 77 applications from various private tertiary institutions for the commencement of the chartering processes.
Of the number, 43 are ready to charter.
Twenty-one others would be due to charter in two years.
Some institutions, according to the GTEC, are unfortunately in distress conditions and are being recommended to shut down.
At the opening of the ninth annual general meeting of the Association of West African Universities (AWAU) at the University of Cape Coast yesterday, the acting Director-General of the GTEC, Prof. Ahmed Jinapor Abdulai, said GTEC aimed at positioning tertiary educational delivery in Ghana as the game changer in the foreign resource mobilisation of the Ghanaian economy within the shortest possible time.
He said though such a target was audacious, it was achievable with the necessary infrastructure in place.
He called on stakeholders within the private tertiary educational delivery sector required to charter to take the exercise seriously.
Charter
An accredited or recognised tertiary educational institution in Ghana, not established by an Act of Parliament, can only operate under the mentorship of an accomplished self-awarding tertiary educational institution recognised as such by the laws of the country where it is located.
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In this affiliation relationship, graduates from the mentored institution continue to be awarded the certificates of the mentoring institution until the mentored institution is granted state recognition to award its own certificates by the grant of a presidential charter.
The award of such a charter follows a successful application when it has served under mentorship for a period not less than 10 years.
AWAU AGM
The meeting brought together tertiary education managers and researchers from across the sub region, to deliberate on effective strategies to promote quality tertiary education.
It was on the theme: "Promoting quality tertiary education in West Africa through collaboration, regional integration and technology’’.
Quality education
Prof. Abdulai said promoting quality tertiary education in West Africa undoubtedly required a concerted effort from all stakeholders, saying the conference was an excellent addition in the realisation of quality education efforts.
"For us at the GTEC, we believe that quality, as a requirement in tertiary educational delivery, is not just a need but a necessity; stressing that accreditation was a basic requirement for quality assurance, one that guaranteed adherence to the tenets, norms and standards of practice.
He said he believed collaboration, regional integration and technology could be properly situated within the spectrum of quality tertiary educational delivery when the minimum operational standard for delivery was in place.
In a keynote address delivered on his behalf, the Registrar of the Joint Admission Board of Nigeria, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, said there were a lot of structural distortions militating against the development of Africa stressing that African tertiary education must restrategise to address such.
He pointed out that there must be enhanced collaboration and integration leveraging of technology to improve quality and access while addressing future employability of graduates.
Prof. Oloyede called for the cultivation of new frontiers in promoting career enhancement to ensure the youth in the sub region and on the continent did not move in search of quality education.
He called for policies and governance systems that promoted financial support in the tertiary institutions to enhance research and knowledge generation in the tertiary institutions.
He noted that the scramble for education outside the region and continent called for imperative efforts to rebuild the institutions, some of which he described as highly retarded, into attractive institutions providing quality education for employability, skills and career enhancement.
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Fake
The Registrar of Nigeria’s Joint Admission Board further called for stringent measures to stamp out fake degrees across the sub region.
He noted that recently an incident involving fake degrees from Benin and Togo had compelled Nigeria to ban degrees from 18 foreign universities in the sub region.
The Vice Chancellor of University of Cape Coast, Prof. Johnson Nyarko Boampong, warned against miscreants who sought to develop fake certificates of the university for their endeavours.
He said the university had been vigilant in ensuring its graduates were of high quality and competent for the job market.
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