The Deputy Director of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, Professor Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor has stated that his outfit will soon publish the names of educational institutions involved in administering programmes that have not been accredited.

According to him, programmes being unaccredited means they have not been published on the website of the GTEC. He added that rolling out the said programmes spells imprisonment for perpetrators, according to the law.

“Starting from this week till next week, we are going to start publishing all centres, programmes that are run by various institutions that are unaccredited. By law, we are supposed to have published those that are credited, and by inference, it means that if the programme is not published on the GTEC website or in the newspapers, automatically, it is unaccredited,” he said on JoyFM’s Midday.

“It is a “prisonable offence for you to run a programme that is unaccredited or to even advertise it,” he added.

Elaborating further, the Deputy Director established that it is also not appropriate for institutions to advertise programmes after applying for accreditation. Applying for accreditation does not authorise advertisement for said programmes, he cautioned.

Some institutions continue to run programmes without accreditation for same although the GTEC had earlier issued a warning, telling the institutions to desist from doing so.

Presently, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has over 300 programmes yet to be accredited, according to its Vice Chancellor, Prof. Rita Akosua Dickson.

Responding to audit findings before the Public Accounts Committee, she said most of the programmes are at various stages of accreditation describing it as an unfair suggestion for such programmes to be stopped.

“Currently, we have more than 500 programmes and as we speak, we have about over 140 accredited but some of them are at various stages of accreditation.

“For example, I am able to report that we’ve been working very closely with GTEC to ensure that these programmes are accredited. 

“As we speak, we have over 100 programmes that we are expecting GTEC to mobilise faculty and come and review on our campus,” she explained.

Also, authorities of the University of Ghana (UG) say they have taken steps to ensure the accreditation of some of the school’s programmes listed as unaccredited in the 2021 Auditor General’s report.

Speaking at the Public Accounts Committee on Tuesday, Registrar, Emelia Agyei Mensah said, the University has made sure 60 out of 80 undergraduate programmes are now accredited.

“Out of the 80, I would say that currently, we have 60 of the undergraduate programme fully accredited and the rest are in the process of being accredited,” he told the Vice-Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Samuel Atta Mills.