National President of the Conference of Principals of Colleges of Education (PRINCOF), Samuel Atintono, has lamented the infrastructural deficit at colleges of education in the country, insisting the challenge is hampering work on campus.

According to him, due to the predicament both students and teachers find themselves in, they have had to resort to devising means of addressing the situation internally. He revealed that although relevant stakeholders are doing all they can to resolve the challenges, a lot more needs to be done.

“For us as principals, it is hampering work on campus. What is happening currently is, we bring on board two cohorts of students at a time, mainly because of the lack of infrastructure on campus… Even though there have been efforts to augment the infrastructure, I think it has been so slow and we need to actually pay much more attention to the colleges, because if you get to the colleges, you see a very huge disparity between the infrastructure in the colleges of education and that of even secondary schools…”
Samuel Atintono

Highlighting on the major challenge confronting these colleges, Mr Atintono indicated that some of the problems started with GETFund which led to poor management and uncoordinated projects implemented in some colleges with recourse to either GTEC or GETFund. The results, he explained, are seen in the abandonment of these projects a decade down the line.

“If you get back to those infrastructure, you’ll notice that technically, you’ll have to re-deploy soo much money in order to bring them back or even deploy them which is not a good thing. Now, the allocation of GETFund to the colleges of education itself, when they became tertiary institutions, it’s so small. It is based on the number of students and the number of students at the colleges are usually not many.”
Samuel Atintono

The national President of PRINCOF stated that considering the fact that colleges have been converted into tertiary institutions, there’s the need to have a special kind of arrangement to augment the infrastructure. This, he noted, is where there has been a deficiency because every year and for every college, allocation is about GHC1 million or GHC2 million, which is inadequate.

“But I am happy in the last year or last two years, they now decided that there should be special attention that’s why they are constructing the 300 bed capacity for the 43 colleges…”
Samuel Atintono

Government committed to resolving infrastructure deficit

On his part, Prof Mohammed Salifu, Director General of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), revealed that the infrastructure deficit within these colleges are not indicative of apathy from the Commission. He highlighted that plans are underway to progressively address the shortfalls.

“I don’t think it’s lack of attention… We’ve had specific plans to address that. It’s not that we didn’t anticipate the numbers going up, it’s not as if we don’t know what we are supposed to do. We have plans and we’ve started some investments in the area… But the experience has been variable. You made mention of the Barabaga College of Education, there are one or two littered all over the tertiary space not just for colleges of education but even in some of the universities.”
Prof Mohammed Salifu

Prof Salifu noted some commitments from the GETFund which were done in “haphazard manner and uncontrolled way”, which the Fund’s cash flow wasn’t able to address them. Nonetheless, he explained that the GETFund management has since put in place a certain structured process of getting financial clearance and getting stalled project properly planned so that they can be dealt with.

“If we haven’t made any significant progress in colleges, it’s not because there’s no priority on it. It’s just simply because there are a lot of things to do, even though we understand the connections, there’s constraint on the resources to deal with these things. So, we tackle them one at a time and in some sequential manner.”
Prof Mohammed Salifu

Citing the Barabaga College of Education, Prof Salifu highlighted that despite 17 years of stalled projects in the college, there’s a history of projects being stalled in the tertiary education institutions generally. He elaborated that the history goes back to a period where there wasn’t enough coordination and planning between the user agencies who sometimes could get the projects started under the guise of being funded under IGF only to be rolled on to the GETFund.

“Sometimes they are even started by regional administrations and only later GETFund gets to know about that. Last year, GETFund went to parliament to get approval for a plan to deal with those… The one that we’ve planned, in terms of addressing the specific challenge of getting infrastructure, is to deal with the four years programme as opposed to three years when we had the diploma programme in the colleges of education. So, there’s a plan, the plan has started and unfortunately, contractors haven’t been as cooperative as we anticipated…”
Prof Mohammed Salifu