GTEC introduces a digital platform to speed tertiary accreditations

The management of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) has introduced a digital platform dubbed Accelerated Accreditation Approach to fast-track the accreditation processes for universities and programmes.

The Director-General of GTEC, Professor Ahmed Jinapor, in an interview with the Daily Graphic said the Accelerated Accreditation Approach is developed to end the waiting period for accreditation of programmes and universities.

Prof. Jinapor explained that the decision to introduce the platform was to ensure that the GTEC cleared any backlog of accreditation issues so that all programmes were in good standing within the shortest possible time.

The Director appealed to the Vice-Chancellors of universities to take a personal interest in ensuring that their Quality Assurance staff sped up their processes to avoid delays which often led to a lot of challenges for all stakeholders.

The introduction of the digital platform comes after GTEC, in October 2023 suspended the processing of new accreditation applications for academic programmes from all public universities, including the technical universities, until January 1, 2024.

The suspension of accreditation, however, did not affect the University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD) at Somanya in the Eastern Region.

That decision, the Ghana Tertiary Commission said, was informed by the need to sanitise the accreditation space as a result of the persistent non-compliance by some institutions with the accreditation requirements of the country.

“Any public university that submits new programme accreditation application for consideration by the commission post-December 31, 2023, must demonstrate a clean sheet of programmes in good standing (having valid accreditation status) before the new one is admitted

Rather than the directive indicting public universities, Mr Mensah admitted that most of the public universities were actually doing well with the accreditation processes, “particularly those with relatively fewer programmes,” a letter to all public universities stated.