GTEC to receive new accreditation applications from 1st February

The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) will on Thursday, February 01, 2024, open admissions for all public tertiary institutions to apply for accreditation to run new programmes. Professor Ahmed Jinapor Abdulai, the Acting Director General of GTEC, who announced this said there would, however, be strict and guided clauses to inform the whole process. 'As we accept applications for new programmes, there is something that is going to inform the whole practice and it includes setting up a new body which specifically will be dealing with policy approval,' he stated. Speaking at a meeting of Vice Chancellors of Technical Universities in Kumasi, Prof. Jinapor Abdulai said 'We want institutions to stay in their niche and mandate areas and could not be doing everything and anything. 'The system whereby you have technology institutions which are mandated to do technology-oriented programmes but today are doing Akan, Twi, Dagbani, I think should be something of the past,' he stated. The Acting Director Ge neral said the new body to be set up would ensure that the programmes had relevance to the developmental aspirations of the country and such programmes should not be programmes that fed into the saturated market of the economy. Prof. Jinapor Abdulai giving the background of the reconsideration of Commission to receive new applications indicated that somewhere in October 2023, the GTEC issued a fiat putting a freeze on all new programmes for accreditation due the backlog of unaccredited programmes in tertiary institutions. He said under the wheels of the accelerated accreditation approach, the Commission had been able to clear close to 1,000 programmes that had been in backlog for some time now. He said the GTEC was interested in fast tracking applications, such that once an application was brought in, it should be able to get approval within six months. Prof. Jinapor Abdulai envisaged an accreditation environment that was digital, efficient and had the public's confidence to engender a sanitised tertiary education space. Source: Ghana News Agency