The management of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology has described, as inaccurate, portions of the Auditor General’s report that said only 61 out of 360 programmes in the institution had been accredited.
According to the University Relations Officer, Dr. Daniel Norris Bekoe, the University has fully complied with regulations by Ghana Tertiary Education Commission.
Dr. Daniel Norris Bekoe argued that the university cannot be blamed if the body responsible for working on accreditation for those existing programmes had not done its job as expected.
“We have submitted over 468 applications for existing programs, so when the documents are with GTEC, and they haven’t been worked on, there is a little delay. That is not to say, the university is running unaccredited programs. KNUST existed long ago before the setting up of the National Accreditation Board and GTEC so most of these programs we are talking about have been running for over 70 years. So how can one say that, these programs that have trained some of the finest brains in this country are unaccredited?”
The Auditor-General’s report for 2021 noted that for the schools, “accreditation expired or requires re-accreditation during the period under review.”
The report revealed that 374 academic programmes at the University of Ghana are unaccredited.
The 299 programmes at KNUST were also not accredited.
At KNUST, out of the 360 programmes run by the University, only 61 were accredited, 190 were sent to National Accreditation Board (NAB) for accreditation and re-accreditation with 109 yet to be sent to NAB for accreditation.
The Auditor-General recommended that the Management of the University should “expedite action for accreditation and re-accreditation of all new and expired academic programmes respectively.”
KNUST was also asked to “liaise with Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) to take retrospective accreditations to cover all the non-accredited certificates issued to students.”
The Auditor-General recommended that the school should stop running programmes that were not accredited to avoid sanctions by NAB.