GTEC suspends accreditation of ‘new programmes’ for universities

Effective January 1, 2024, the accreditation of new programmes for public universities including government technical universities has been suspended, the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) has told the Daily Graphic.

In an interview with the newspaper, an official of the Tertiary Education Commission said the University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD) at Somanya in the Eastern Region is excluded from the suspension.

The Director of Accreditation of GTEC, John Dadzie Mensah says the move is informed by the need to sanitise the accreditation space due to the persistent non-compliance by some institutions with the accreditation requirements of the country.

“Any public university that submits new programme accreditation application for consideration by the commission post-December 31, 2023, must demonstrate a clean sheet of programmes in good standing (having valid accreditation status) before the new one is admitted

Rather than the directive indicting public universities, Mr Mensah admitted that most of the public universities were actually doing well with the accreditation processes, “particularly those with relatively fewer programmes,” a letter to all public universities stated.

The suspension comes after the Deputy Director-General of GTEC, Professor Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor said his outfit next month will begin a serial publication of unaccredited programmes and centres in newspapers and on its website.

He also said the Commission would submit the list of unaccredited programmes and centres to all government agencies so that they would not employ anybody who had a certificate for a programme that was not accredited.

“The public is to resist offers from institutions to study such unaccredited courses. They are always to visit the GTEC’s website to be sure that they did not accept to pursue programmes that had not been accredited,” he said.

The move the Director of the Tertiary Commission 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.

“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,” Professor Jinapor told the Graphic newspaper.