Professor Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor, the Deputy Director of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), has announced that the commission will soon release the names of educational institutions that are offering unaccredited programs.

He emphasized that unaccredited programs are those that have not been officially published on the GTEC website. Professor Jinapor further explained that administering such programs is a violation of the law and can result in imprisonment for those involved.

The move to publish the names of institutions offering unaccredited programs aims to ensure transparency and protect the interests of students seeking quality education in Ghana.

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.

In addition, the Deputy Director highlighted that it is not acceptable for institutions to advertise programs while they are in the process of seeking accreditation. Merely applying for accreditation does not grant permission for program advertisement, he cautioned.

Despite previous warnings from GTEC, some institutions continue to offer programs without proper accreditation. This disregard for the guidelines set by GTEC has been addressed by the commission, urging these institutions to cease such practices.

Furthermore, the Vice Chancellor of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Prof. Rita Akosua Dickson, revealed that the university currently has over 300 programs awaiting accreditation. Prof. Dickson clarified that most of these programs are in various stages of the accreditation process, emphasizing that it would be unfair to halt these programs based on their current status.

“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.