Executive Director of Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch), Kofi Asare, has expressed the need for government and relevant stakeholders to streamline the accreditation process of university programs in the country to reduce backlog.

According to him, dealing with accrediting bodies, especially in Ghana shows that no accrediting body has the capacity to hire staff and experts that undertake the due diligence certification and standard testing. He revealed that due to this, consultants are always engaged to undertake such tasks.

Mr Asare indicated that engaging consultants in the case of GTEC should not be a good enough reason for the delay in the accreditation of programs for universities in the country.

“I have enough experience in this accreditation processes in Ghana to appreciate that sometimes, the process takes too long and if we streamline the application, the due diligence and approval processes of accreditation requirement, we should be able to reduce the backlogs and then encourage people to apply. Sometimes, I know institutions where the board has to meet and approve that accreditation and sometimes it can take more than a year… So yes, we need to streamline the accreditation process…”
Kofi Asare

Commenting on the Auditor General’s report which revealed that Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the University of Ghana run some hundreds of unaccredited program, Mr Asare highlighted the need for accrediting bodies to adopt technological approaches as the approach for accrediting institutions is still manual. He noted that once the system for accreditation is digitised, it will speed up the process.

Accreditation of public institutions

The Eduwatch Executive Director stated that the challenges of accreditation of programs in Ghana unlike in other countries and public institutions, predates the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, the National Accreditation Board and the National Council Teachers Education.

He stated that during the tenure of honourable Baah Wierdu and Osafo Maafo as ministers of education, it took a ministerial intervention to “whip” most of these public institutions to “accede to the processes” of the existing National Accreditation Board, especially program accreditation.

“So naturally, when the accrediting body was established, all existing institutions and programs they were running had to be taken through accreditation. So, there has since been a backlog. Apart from that, the demand for tertiary education leading to the growth in various programs also led to a situation where some of the programs have not been duly accredited before tertiary institutions began running them.”
Kofi Asare

Mr Asare emphasized that programs that are yet to be re-accredited are less detrimental to individuals as they have in the past been accredited for the five year period and the accreditations expired and all they have to do is apply for a renewal. He explained that the “serious ones” are the programs that have not been accredited at all and are now being processed for accreditation.

Unaccredited programs, Mr Asare indicated, must be treated with gravitas as they do not have any form of prior accreditation for a program and it is “criminal according to section 36 of the education regulatory bodies’ law”.

Mr Asare indicated that accreditation is not just a process, but a quality assurance mechanism. With this, he noted that the accrediting body must ensure that its training content meets the needs of industries.

“So, there are quality assurance ingredients in the process which can lead to the denial of your application, proposals that will cause an enhancement of your curriculum and all that…”
Kofi Asare