My Response: Ghana’s higher education sector seeks coherent national policies | News | Times Higher Education

Ghana’s higher education sector seeks coherent national policies | News | Times Higher Education

I must comment that I was at the Policy Dialogue mentioned in this write up. Yes the presentations are fairly captured here. However I feel compelled to respond to at least some component of the write up: "What he discovered at the University of Ghana, he says, was “absolute chaos”: it had 151 separate bank accounts, up to 10 students sharing a bedroom and not even a functioning water system.". Now I do not know where the “chaos” comes in here. Until one understands the situation of the Ghanaian Tertiary Terrain it is easy to write off some actions as erratic and un-achieving. In the period that Prof. Shattock was consulting, the University of Ghana was participating in several donor funded programs. Given the record of developing countries in the management of Donor Funded Programs, the World Bank and most funding agencies directed that all projects running and being funded by Non-Ghanaian Aids should be run through independent accounts. This has resulted in several accounts being opened as and when a donor grant was approved for a tertiary education institution in Ghana. Also, Government of Ghana funding is released across two main trenches, which Administration and Service in one trench and infrastructure on the other. For auditing purposes, most institutions run these releases through different accounts.

Now my first submission has looked at funding from Donors and Government. There is another source of income flow, which institutions need to manage thus resulting in several accounts. The case of student fees and dues. Once again, University of Ghana is our yard stick. It is an institution with over 9000 students enrolling per year (and this figure is not factoring in students on the distance education programme). In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s student intake rose dramatically in the public tertiary institutions, thus from a few hundred students widely dispersed across the country, the institutions were now enrolling more than 2000 per academic year. There was no point at this time for the University of Ghana for example to stick to one banking platform to receive student fees. The logical thing to do was to spread its payment system to embrace the then expanding financial sector of Ghana. This spread has resulted in the so called “chaos” of 115 accounts but has helped ease the payment of fees by students. I remember having to queue as a fresh man for 5hrs just to pay my school fees. Now it’s a walk-in-and-walk-out and where internet banking is available, one can even sit at home and complete payment and registration of fees. One should also not forget that University of Ghana like Oxford, Yale and Harvard has several Colleges under its management. All these colleges are quasi-independent institutions with their own administrative structures; thus requiring individual banking lines and platforms. Yes the idea of an institution running more than 100 accounts may seem chaotic, and yes I do believe that there is need to cut down on the number, but I wish there was information to show how many of these accounts are still valid or operational as at the time this article was being made or even at the time Prof. Shattock made his observation. I do not seek to defend the situation, but only to present the reader with the other side of the coin.

On the issue of running water, at the time Prof Shattock was consulting, University of Ghana was in the middle of a huge infrastructural evolution and as such most of the old internal piping system had been disabled. And I am glad that in his 2013 presentation he forwards that the situation has greatly improved. I do believe that University of Ghana and most Tertiary Education Institutions in Ghana are infrastructurally better off than the average community in Ghana.

I must say yes the paper did outline the issues well; however the situation is not as bleak as it seems. We are a working progress and if donor agencies were not to present developing countries with a “one size fits all” approach to resolving our institutional problems, Ghana’s Education Sector would advance faster and further than it has. Note this is my opinion and shall be mine only (http://radikaltinka.blogspot.com)

Funding of Higher Education, Performance Budgeting or Line-Item Budgeting: Issues Arrising

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. 

REGULATION AND LOCALISATION OF TERTIARY EDUCATION INSITUTIONS IN GHANA: THE EQUITY AND ACCESSIBILITY ARGUMENT

This is the second in my series on Regulating Tertiary Education in Ghana: Regulatory Bodies and Their Mandates. I admit, my first piece was a bit boring and technical. Unfortunately, educating a country with internally generated/directed development is not a joking matter. It is the yoke that seeks the break the neck of the serious minded educationist. We only laugh when perceived ludicrous solutions are being proposed by our international development partners for “non-Ghanaian” owned problems. Discovered and diagnosed by them only. Even then, this laughter is but a sarcastic one. Don’t get me wrong, we still posses the humour and jest to hope in the face of challenging unrelenting educational reform problems. And I digress again. Today I will try and present the situation as I perceive it on the quest to make Tertiary Education equally accessible and equitable to all who qualify in Ghana.

The goal of the Government of Ghana, having jumped on the industrialisation band wagon has been to provide the job market with the requisite qualified personnel. The initial 4 universities (University of Ghana, University of Cape Coast, KNUST and University of Education-Winneba) were deemed to be insufficient to produce the required manpower for the expanding Ghanaian Job market. What was the solution? A very innovative solution was championed by the Government. Bring in the private sector. The introduction and acceptance of private participation in Ghana’s Tertiary Education landscape should not have posed any problems from a regulatory point of view. After all the NCTE and NAB had experience in managing the fore mentioned Universities. Valley View, an SDA established university had been in existence for more than two decades before the mass endorsement of Private Public Partnership (PPP) of Tertiary Education. The onset of PPP saw the Tertiary Education landscape expanding rapidly.

Now for a country of about 30million people, only 15% of this has received Tertiary Education with about 60% having been exposed to a form of formal education at some point in their life. This statistics makes Ghana, what the World Bank considers as the Elitism of Education. The concentration of the Ghanaian population is fairly even regionally. According to the 2010 census report, only Greater Accra and Ashanti Region have more than 20% of their population living in urban centres whilst Eastern Region had about 12% of its population in urban centres. The other three regions average 8% of their regional population in urban centres. Why this statistics? Well a look at the existing 60+ Tertiary Education Institutions will show that about 80% are situated in the Greater Accra Region, whilst Ashanti is hosting 10% the remaining 10% is shared by the other 8 regions. What is of import to note is that almost all the Tertiary Education Institutions are situated in Regional Capitals with the exception of Colleges of Education which may be District Hosted. Deductively then, the Capital Accra is host to 80% of Tertiary Education Institutions.

The statistics presented above throws a harrowing and wavering shadow for the future of education, especially where the mantra of equity and equality is being chanted. After all Accra is responsible for only 24% of the national urban dwellers. One must not forget that Ghana is a country of Urban-Education drive. The rural communities have been ignored, forgotten or under served in the delivery of education. At least at the basic level, even if situated under trees, and staffed by poorly qualified personnel there is some level of education being accessed (quality is another story for another day).

One may ask,

1.      Where are the regulatory bodies for Tertiary Education?

2.      Is there any policy on the situation of Tertiary Education Institutions in Ghana?

3.      Is there Equality and Equity in the delivery of Tertiary Education in Ghana?

In answering question 1, I must say that I am yet to come across any policy frame work on the localisation of Tertiary Education Institutions. Yes the regulatory bodies are present. However internal and intra agency rivalry has incapacitated them. The NCTE in failing to stamp its authority on the tertiary landscape left a gaping hole which NAB tasked with assuring quality had to struggle to fill. Their methods may not be the best, however “half a loaf…”. The NAB and NCTE are thus caught in a Jacob-Essau Struggle. The NABPTEX after several calls to disband it, it is currently endearing itself to the quasi Tertiary Education Institutions. One wonders what will become of them when the Governments call for Technical Universities Materialise (Darwin’s Evolutionary theories come to mind here; when a species specialises in only one food source, the extinction of such a species is directly linked to the survival of said food source). These cross agency struggles has left the private sector to map out Tertiary Education to suit their personal goals; profit generation.

I will not forward an argument for Equality nor Equity, for the charges of accessing Tertiary Education, even when its available is astronomically high. Given that majority of the student population is coming from middle and low income families, makes the fees for education at this level nothing short of economic miracles to maintain/afford. Well at a forum, a presenter jokingly said that Ghanaians are “managers”, they are paid peanuts which should have starved ants, and yet month in and month out, they manage to scrape by. When asked: Masa how be?? A Ghanaian worker is more likely to respond: Masa we are managing.

Conclusively, Tertiary Education is not equitably accessible to Ghanaians even though the 1992 constitution mandates it nor is it equally available to all Ghanaians. Sometimes I worry that in our quest to make Tertiary Education equally and equitably accessible, we may sacrifice quality. In the face of poor regulation,  the mice of the educational field are reeling in the harvest. Government may be making in-roads in establishing Tertiary Education Institutions again, but if this agenda is not decoupled from the political partisanship approach, it may never achieve its set target. The questions of Why set up a tertiary Institution? Where to locate it? Who will or can access it? and What is the mandate of such an institution?; should guide government and the regulatory bodies in their quest to make education equitable and equally accessible. 

REGULATING TERTIARY EDUCATION IN GHANA: REGULATORY BODIES AND THEIR MANDATES

Developing countries are saddled with the daunting task of determining the “working method” to extricate them from the quagmire of underdevelopment, navigating the maze of international trade and partnership. Over the years, the trial and error method has been expended in most African countries. Ghana is no exception and I am sure we lost the map of the maze somewhere in the early 90’s as we tried to navigate the waters of economic reforms.

Several education reforms have been enacted as part of efforts to equip Ghana with the requisite labour force to drive, manage and ensure development. Ghana’s Tertiary Education system operates a quasi-government-controlled system. This relationship is mostly evident in funding of the Tertiary Education Institutions. The Bologna Institution had educated the world that a “university” however it is defined, if left without regulation may become the atomic bomb that destroyed the society which invented it. This power of institutions is evident in the role of Tertiary Education Institutions in the various coup d’états of Ghana. As aptly presented by Effah (2010), for the most part, African Universities are government institutions and fully supported financially. It is on fair in this regard that developments that have implications for funding are reviewed with government. Before you jump on the band wagon of the “autonomy” it will interest you that Ghana runs the Bicameral System of Tertiary Education Governance. There is understandable autonomy in the determination of programs and the award of certificates. The set-up of regulatory bodies in Ghana therefore was to satisfy one major condition. That is, to ensure that national priorities receive attention. Effah (2010) points out that the more fragile a government (regime) the more intrusive they show interest in happenings in Tertiary Education Institutions. After all he who pays the piper determines the music.

This piece is the first in a series through which I will seek to review regulation in Tertiary Education in Ghana, the Role of the Government in Power, the perceived autonomy of institutions and regulatory arms, the problems and directions affecting policy development and growth in Tertiary Education in Ghana.

This first piece will present you with the regulatory framework of Ghana’s Tertiary Education. There are three separate bodies in tertiary education which perform the functions set out by the enabling acts that created them. There is the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE) which is fundamentally the policy and development-direction provider for tertiary education in Ghana. There is also the National Accreditation Board (NAB), fundamentally responsible for quality assurance and the third body is the National Board for Professional and Technician Examinations (NABPTEX) with the responsibility of formulation and administration of schemes of examinations. Over the course of the series, each body will be critically assessed and analyzed. Hopefully by the end of this series my readers may understand the Tertiary Education Landscape of Ghana better. For now, let us contend with the summary review of the acts that set up the NCTE, the NAB and NABPTEX.

Legal Mandate and Functions of NCTE

The 1992 Constitution of Ghana mandates the establishment of a number of bodies, one of them being the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE), which was established by an Act of Parliament, Act 454 of 1993. Its predecessor, the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) was established in 1962 and dissolved twice in 1966 and 1986 after changes of Governments.

The NCTE Act 454 of 1993 specifically enjoins the Council:

-          To advise the Minister on the development of institutions of tertiary education in Ghana;

-          To enquire into the financial needs of the institutions of tertiary education, and advise the Minister accordingly;

-          To recommend to the Minister for purposes of the preparation of the annual national education budgets:

o    block allocations of funds towards running costs; and

o   grants towards capital; expenditure of each institution of tertiary education indicating how the allocations are to be disbursed;

-          To recommend national standards and norms including standards and norms on staff, costs, accommodation and time utilization, for approval of the Minister and to monitor the implementation of any approved national standards and norms by the institutions;

-          To advise governing councils of institutions of tertiary education on suitable measures for generating additional funds for their institutions;

-          To publish information on tertiary education in Ghana;

-          To perform any other functions provided in the Act and such other functions relating to tertiary education as are incidental to the functions specified in the Act.

The National Council for Tertiary Education is devoted to providing leadership in the direction, functions, role and relevance of tertiary education in Ghana. To this end the NCTE delivers objective and carefully considered advice to Government, which contributes to the creation of conditions and structures that will support the establishment of a vibrant and dynamic sub-sector.

The NCTE is guided by the needs and priorities of tertiary education institutions which it serves, providing them with reliable information, appropriately targeted resource support and exposing them to global best practices.  Also it ensures that tertiary education assumes its rightful role as a catalyst and resource base for national growth and prosperity. Thus, it provides guidance and advice to drive the development of world-class skills and standards in teaching, research and administration.

The NCTE also plays a strategic mediatory role between the differing priorities of stakeholders (Government, tertiary institutions, teachers, students, civil society, and industry/business).

Legal Mandate and Functions of NABTEX

The Government white paper on the Reforms to the Tertiary Education System that was published in 1991 made several proposals for the restructuring and reorganization of Tertiary Education and Tertiary Educational Institutions. The proposals included, among others, the establishment of a Board of Accreditation to contribute to the “furtherance of better management of tertiary education” as the Quality Assurance body at the tertiary education level. The National Accreditation Board was established by the Government of Ghana in 1993 with the enactment of PNDCL 317, 1993; which has since been replaced by the National Accreditation Board Act, 2007, Act 744.

The birth of the National Accreditation Board as a regulatory agency of the Ministry of Education therefore is to ensure that the country’s tertiary education system continues to be responsive to a fast changing world and to make its graduates progressively competitive in the world of work. Over the past 19years has dedicated itself to facilitating the establishment of both public and private tertiary institutions and ensuring that set standards are maintained. The Board has accredited several institutions that are offering a variety of quality academic programmes for the benefit of students in Ghana.

According to Act 744, the Board is mandated to:

·         Accredit both public and private (tertiary) institutions with regard to the contents    and standards of their programmes.

·         Determine, in consultation with the appropriate institution or body, the programme and requirements for the proper operation of that institution and the maintenance of acceptable levels of academic or professional standards;

·         Determine the equivalences of diplomas, certificates and other qualifications awarded by institutions in Ghana or elsewhere.

·         Publish as it considers appropriate the list of accredited public and private institutions at the beginning of the calendar year.

·         Advise the President on the grant of a Charter to a private tertiary institution.

·         Perform any other functions determined by the Minister.

Legal Mandate and Functions of NABTEX

NABPTEX like its sister supervisory bodies is established by an Act of Parliament (1994, ACT 492). The Board is responsible for formulating and administering schemes of evaluation, assessment, certification and standards for:

o   skill competence;

o   syllabus competence

for non-university tertiary institutions, professional bodies and private institutions with accreditation by the National Accreditation Board established under the National Accreditation Board Act, 2007 (ACT 744).

NABPTEX by its legal mandate provides administrative and structural facilities and expertise for the organisation and conduct of professional and technician examinations; and in consultation with the relevant polytechnics and professional institutions conduct examinations and award national certificates and diplomas based on the result of the examinations. The Board therefore, at the request of government or any other body, conducts examinations as requested. The board is also responsible for the review of syllabuses for general curriculum enrichment as well as the appointment of examiners and moderators and determine methods for the proper conduct of examinations.

The board also makes regulations to govern its examinations and awards. It also devises schemes for testing skills for competence and aptitude testing. To this end, NABPTEX is mandated to provide such guidance and counselling services as would be needed by non-university tertiary institutions. The Sector Minister may also empower them to perform any ancillary functions