Government has no money to fund courses accreditation – former minister reveals
The inability of some government tertiary institutions to follow laid down procedures before bringing out courses of study for students has left former Minister of State in charge of Tertiary Education, Professor Kwasi Yankah worried.
He noted that the institutions are in the habit of making budgetary allocations without careful consideration of the programs they run.
As it stands now they have been confronted by the situation where the government is cash constrained to fund the said programs hence stands the risk of not being accredited.
The former Minister revealed this while expressing his thoughts on the recent Auditor General’s report which unravelled the fact that some public tertiary institutions are running unaccredited programs.
University of Ghana which was caught up in the situation has 374 courses not gone through the proper accreditation process. For the breakdown, 14 are Diploma programmes, 80 are Undergraduate courses, 213 are Post-Graduate courses, and 67 are PhD courses.
The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, on the other hand, has only 61 programmes accredited, out of the 360 programmes run by the University. Meanwhile, 190 were also sent to the National Accreditation Board for accreditation and re-accreditation.
He said “We are running a very haphazard budget, at the end of the year you submit your budgetary needs to the government without referring to the programme that you have instituted which has budgetary implications because the government may not have money for the programme,
he then expressed that he is particularly concerned about the budgetary willingness of the government in terms of accrediting the programs lest we stand the risk of just running courses chaotically without proper regulation.
