Economist and Professor of Finance at the University of Ghana says GETFund is fueling the growth of foreign universities against local public institutions that remain grossly underfunded; as most beneficiaries go overseas for their education.

Prof Godfred Bokpin said “We are using our hard-earned money, taxes to build universities outside. We are making them better and better on a yearly basis through GETFund allocations whilst our public universities are heavily underfunded.”

Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile Saturday, Prof. Bokpin stated that most of the courses being studied by these GETFund beneficiaries abroad are being taken in universities across the country and thus called for more GETFund funds to be injected into the local public universities instead.

“If you look at the amount of money, for individuals, for first degrees and all of that, you’d have to do extraordinary to convince me that we don’t have such programmes in this country. “

A performance audit report of the Auditor-General on the administration of scholarships by GETFund listed some government officials as beneficiaries of GETFund scholarships, which are meant for needy but brilliant students.

However, Prof Bokpin said the practice of using funds from GETFund to sponsor the education of privileged individuals defeats the purpose of the GETFund as it rather creates a larger inequality gap through education.

“We don’t have enough money as a country. The little that we have, is that the best way to use it? We all do know that education is one of the surest ways of narrowing inequality. But the way we are doing this, we are further entrenching the inequality.

“And when we say lets narrow inequality through the allocation of public resources and all of that, we are not doing the poor a favour, we are doing ourselves a favour because the day there is trouble, they [poor] will not forgive,” he said.