I am an
education enthusiast. To a fault I am an idealist, believing in the goodness of
mankind. I am delusional in the belief that an educated mind will present and
relate more with empiricism in the face of assumptions. Maybe its time I let go
of these delusions and believes for I am in Africa now and reality check says I
am dreaming. But then and again I have always been a stubborn mule (imagine
that) and refuse to wake up. I will dream away and be lost in my beliefs.
This is the
third in my series of regulating tertiary education in Ghana. I know I am not
following any clear pattern. I will be faulted for not jumping from set-up,
through governance and mandate regulations before jumping on the funding band
wagon. But Hei, its money and who doesn’t love talking about it.
It is a
fact that the most pressing issue of Higher Education in developing countries
is that of funding. Left alone and without government restrictions, I am quite
sure that most of Tertiary Education Institutions in Ghana would have managed
to fund themselves adequately. However we have all witnessed what Educated
Elitism can result it; Liberia (even though no one wants to admit to it: the Americo-Liberian
and Indigenous Liberian situation), Rwanda and Burundi to mention a few. Yes
the various coup d’états in Ghana have been politically driven, however we cannot
dissociate the alienation of the then less educated Ghanaian from participation
in governance and access to national resources of the country at that time as
one of the leading factors. I digress again.
Recently I
submitted an abstract to the up-coming Tertiary Education Managers Conference
in Australia (September 2013). Though my abstract was not accepted for
presentation, I am still thinking of completing the paper for a publication. My
topic was on “BUDGETING TRENDS IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN GHANA, COMPARING
PERFORMANCE (PROGRAMME) BUDGETING AND LINE-ITEM BUDGETING” I present excepts
from my abstract below:
Governments
are under pressure to evaluate their own performance. Information about public
sector performance can satisfy the public’s need to know, and can be used to
show that governments provide good value for money through their actions.
Perhaps most important, performance information has the potential to help
policy makers to make better budget and management decisions.
As
countries develop and incomes begin to rise, public spending tends to shift
towards infrastructure maintenance and social programs. The traditional Public
Tertiary Education Institutions finance system in Ghana relied on block grant
allocations to institutions.
Institutional
development was therefore saddles with strict bottom-up budgeting approach,
potential future fiscal risk, and operational inefficiency from managerial
inflexibility often associated with traditional budgeting meant that innovation
was stifled. In the periods following the 1966 coup to the 4th Republic in
1992, Tertiary institutions saw little if any marginal growth. Revolutionaries
saddled with the problems of salvaging perceived and actual economic
catastrophes, the Tertiary Institutions in Ghana were partially financed via
the system of Block Grants. Following a return to democracy, policy makers recognized
that Block
Grants did not equip institutions to adequately respond to changing demographic
profiles and their impact on spending, nor to the need for more intensive use
of resources and greater accountability demanded in democratic societies. The
challenge of providing tertiary education in Ghana today is not the same as
that faced in past. Today the challenge is more in terms of strategic
allocation of resources and equity of public spending, and greater efficiency
in the use of public resources.
While there
are many factors that influence government budgeting decisions, program
performance is rapidly becoming a more significant factor. Knowing how well or
poorly a program is performing based on a given budget helps resource managers
make informed decisions about the allocation and reallocation of finite funds.
The ability to make sound resource allocation decisions is increasingly
important in a fiscally constrained environment.
Over the
years, budgetary allocations and budgetary releases for Tertiary Education
institutions have been on a trickle in basis, forcing most institutions to
adopt Line-Item budgeting. It’s advantage of simplicity and attention to
immediacy has kept Public Tertiary Institutions afloat for the past 30years if
not more. In the face of this, evaluating and enforcing best practices amongst
tertiary education institutions in Ghana is difficult as there is little if any
holding power for the regulatory bodies (National Council for Tertiary Education,
National Accreditation Board).
By tracking
performance and expenditures of Tertiary Institutions, regulatory bodies can
identify areas of challenged, sustained, or improved performance and make
recommendations for increasing, decreasing, or maintaining resource levels. The
integration of performance and budget also enables regulatory bodies to achieve
set standards and norms targets for tertiary education. Thus, making informed
choices in assigning resources to those areas that will optimize performance.
While this integration process is a terrific managerial tool, the main benefit
is that it provides the public with a clear and transparent means of seeing the
fiscal stewardship practised by regulatory bodies of tertiary education.
My
subsequent write up will seek a comparative analysis between Performance Budgeting
and Line-Item Budgeting, in terms:
• The impact of budgetary systems on
Institutional Governance, Regulatory Bodies Coordination and Accountable
responsibilities to stakeholders. The associated benefits of budgetary systems
that have been adopted by the Ghana
• Government for financing Tertiary
Education, and their impact on innovation, research and development of Tertiary
Education Institutions.
Kindly humor
me.
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