GIJ, NAFTI and GIL to be merged into one university

Government on Tuesday re-affirmed its plans to merge the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) and Ghana Institute of Languages (GIL) into one university.

Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, the Minister of Education, addressing journalists at the Meet-the-Press series in Accra, said the Government took the decision because none of the three institutions qualified to be a separate university.

He noted that the three institutions serve a common vocational and technical purpose, therefore, consolidating them would enable the three to award their own degrees, improve their facilities and maximise resources.

Currently, he said, those institutions award degrees through their mentoring institution, University of Ghana.

Dr Opoku Prempeh said one of the key deliverable of the Akufo-Addo-led government was to enhance the quality of education in the country and expressed the belief that the teacher was at the centre of that purpose.

In view that, he said, the Government had undertaken a number of educational reforms including reforming the teaching, curricula, technical and vocational training and restructure tertiary institutions to absorb the high number of students being trained under the Free Senior High School Policy.

“The shortest cut between poverty and success is through education,” he said, and gave the assurance of government’s burning desire to provide education to every Ghanaian child, irrespective of the financial status of the parents to propel the country’s development agenda.

“We often compare our standard of education to Finland but one of the biggest issues about education and children’s attainment in education is the level of education of that child’s parents,” he said.



“Every research around the world shows that the more educated your parents are, the better educated your children become,” he said.

The Education Minister gave the assurance that the National Standard Framework, which would serve as the benchmark for assessing the quality of education in the country, would soon be passed, which would guide the assessment of the standard of education.

He said the measurement of the quality of education was multifaceted, involving the assessment of curricula, teaching and learning materials, and capacity of teachers among others.

In that regard, he said, successive governments had been implementing various educational reforms since 2007, culminating in the passage of the Education Act, Act 778 of 2008, which established three regulators.

They are the National Teaching Council, National Inspectorate Board and National Curriculum and Assessment.

Those educational bodies, he said, were formed to enhance the quality of education in the country comparable to the best education standard worldwide, however, those bodies did not have executive secretaries.

He, therefore, said the three bodies would be migrated from the Ghana Education Service with their respective executive secretaries in order to play their independent roles to improve the quality of education.