The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) has put a freeze on accreditation for new programmes by universities that have not fully renewed already running programmes.
The commission has signalled that by next month, it will begin a serial publication of unaccredited programmes and centres in newspapers and on its website.
It has consequently cautioned the public to resist offers from institutions to study such unaccredited programmes.
The GTEC said it would submit the list of unaccredited programmes and centres to all government agencies so that they would not employ anybody who had a certificate of a programme that was not accredited.
The Deputy Director-General of GTEC, Professor Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor, who disclosed this in an interview with the Daily Graphic, advised the public to always visit the commission’s website to be sure that they did not accept to pursue programmes that had not been accredited.
That, he said, formed part of major steps by the regulatory body to sanitise the accreditation environment to ensure that no university in the country ran unaccredited programmes.
For two years running, the Auditor General’s Report has carried concerns that most of the public universities are running programmes that have not been accredited.
“We are going to put a moratorium on acceptance of new applications until all the accreditation environment is sanitised, and the caveat is that not all institutions are culpable,” Prof. Jinapor said.
He said some of such universities had been invited for a discussion after GTEC met with its council to discuss the proposal to that effect.
“We believe that the general public will not be motivated to apply for such programmes, and that will serve as demotivation to the institutions running those programmes,” he said.
Authentication
“Also, we are close to getting a deal with the Ministry of Finance for GTEC to evaluate all applications that come to the public sector for employment in terms of their certificates,” Prof. Jinapor added.
He said by law, the GTEC was mandated to evaluate the authenticity of all certificates issued in the country.
With current technology leading to the proliferation of fake certificates, the GTEC Deputy Director-General said his outfit was making a strong case for individuals who sought employment in the public sector, in particular, to provide evidence that their certificates were evaluated by GTEC.
“You will agree with me that there is a proliferation of fake certificates by virtue of computerisation and digitalisation; people are able to generate certificates.
“So, it is not just about checking the authenticity and validity of such certificates; it is also a means of telling the general public that this particular certificate, even though it emanated from a university, that certificate, by the training offered to that particular person, is not fit for purpose,” he explained.
Reacting to complaints by managers of the universities that they were running such unaccredited programmes because GTEC unnecessarily delayed with the process, Prof. Jinapor dismissed those claims as unacceptable, adding that such an excuse could not be the basis for which unaccredited programmes were run.
Source: myghanadaily
