The Deputy Director General of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), Prof. Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor, has expressed concern about some public universities’ continuous running of unaccredited programmes at their various institutions.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Middaynews on Wednesday, he described the situation as ‘disappointing.”
This comes after the Auditor–General’s report in 2022 revealed a number of unaccredited programmes offered by the University of Ghana and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and recommended that management of the universities expedite action for accreditation and re-accreditation of all new and expired academic programmes respectively.
However, the universities are still running some unaccredited programmes as of today.
As a result, Prof Abdulai Jinapor says GTEC will publish all centres and unaccredited programmes to caution the public from sourcing such programmes.
He added that by law, GTEC is supposed to publish those that are accredited but, they are taking the new directive by publishing unaccredited courses.
“Starting from this week to next week, we are going to start publishing all centres, and programmes that are run by various institutions that are unaccredited,” the Deputy Director of GTEC said.
According to him, GTEC will crack the whip because running unaccredited courses is an offence, and managers of the institutions are fully aware of this.
Responding to questions on why some programmes are still not accredited by UG and KNUST, Mr Abdulai Jinapor said the problem has to do with the mindset and understanding of what accreditation is.
According to him, the fact that the universities may have applied for accreditation does not give them the go-ahead to advertise courses and programmes that are not accredited, adding that the courses do not always get accredited though universities may have applied for accreditation.
He further explained that the excuse to run unaccredited programmes just because the programme may have expired when the student is in the third or fourth year does not hold.
He noted this because “the letter that gives accreditation is emphatic and unequivocal that you must start the accreditation process one year ahead of time. So, there is no way that a programme should expire the period that is being run.”
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