The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) has approved over 1000 programs for study by public universities nationwide.
According to Dr. Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor, the Director-General of GTEC, these programs aim to streamline the academic calendar of tertiary institutions.
To maintain focus and ensure relevance to national development goals, Dr. Jinapor revealed plans to establish a new oversight body.
This body will monitor public universities to ensure they adhere to their designated mandates and areas of expertise.
“We want institutions to stay in their niche, institutions should stay in their mandate areas. Institutions cannot be doing anything and everything. The system whereby you have technology institutions that are mandated to do technology-oriented programmes, but today doing Akan, Twi, Dagbani, I think should be something of the past.
“Hence, this body will ensure that you fall within your niche, the programmes must have relevance to the developmental aspirations of this country. And such programmes should not feed into saturated markets of this economy,” the Director-General of GTEC stated.
Dr. Jinapor emphasized the need for institutions to specialize and contribute meaningfully to the country’s developmental aspirations.
The Director-General also highlighted the importance of avoiding programs that might contribute to already saturated markets in the economy.