Only All Nations University accredited

The National Accreditation Board (NAB) says only the All Nations University in Koforidua has been accredited to offer a programme in oil and gas in the country.

It has, therefore, cautioned members of the public wanting to pursue such a programme in any institution to cross-check with the board before applying.

The Executive Secretary of the NAB, Mr. Kwame Dattey, who said this in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said not even a single public university had been accredited to offer such a programme.

He said two public universities, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and the University of Science and Technology (UMaT), Tarkwa, had applied to run programmes in petro-chemicals.

He said the NAB was ready to grant accreditation to institutions that intended to run the course, provided they met the requisite requirements needed for such programmes.

Mr. Dattey said the NAB had set up a quality assurance committee that sent out academic auditors to conduct random checks on the qualification of students and lecturers in various tertiary institutions.

The move, he said, was to prevent the institutions from admitting and using unqualified students and lecturers, saying that the quality assurance committee was set up to know whether or not institutions were still conforming to the rules and regulations under which they were supposed to operate.

He noted that the board had identified about five private tertiary institutions that were engaged in such a practice.

Mr. Dattey did not mention the names of the institutions and said the board had asked them (institutions) to withdraw the unqualified persons, failure of which the names of those institutions would be published, after which their accreditation would be withdrawn.

He said the checks were ongoing and that all the 57 accredited private institutions would be covered under the checks, adding that there were rules and regulations guiding the operations of educational institutions in the country.

On the qualification of students to enter tertiary institution, he said the minimum was aggregate 24 in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) or its equivalents.

Mr. Dattey said a lecturer in a tertiary institution must have a research degree, since teaching did not only involve imparting of knowledge but also research.