The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) has said it has a plan in place to clear the backlog of unaccredited courses at some of Ghana’s universities.

“We have arranged with the universities for a special arrangement to get them off our books,” the Director General of the commission, Prof Mohammed Salifu, said on Eyewitness News.

He said this is on the back of the Auditor General’s recent report which indicates that over 600 academic programmes at the University of Ghana and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) were not accredited in 2021.

The report revealed that 374 academic programmes at the University of Ghana are unaccredited.

299 programmes offered by KNUST were also not accredited.

Though KNUST has kicked against this finding, saying the commission was lagging in its duties, Prof Salifu said the schools were ultimately at fault.

“The law is very explicit on that. The onus is on the university to make sure that they have accreditation before they run [programmes]. If you don’t have accreditation, you don’t run the programme.”

“Those applications that recently came here are applications that within a month or two have flooded our system because we discovered they were programmes whose accreditation had expired.”

“If within a month or two you bring 400 programmes to this place, obviously you are not going to expect an immediate response on that,” Prof. Salifu said.