GETfund Officials Interact With GCTU Management
A six-member delegation from the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) Secretariat has paid a courtesy visit to the Ghana Communication Technology University (GCTU) on Friday, October 27, 2023 at the Vice-Chancellor’s Board Room.
During interactions with Management, the leader of the delegation and Deputy Administrator of GETFund, Mr. Joseph Denteh informed Management that the visit was to familiarize with GCTU, a promising University and especially to see how best to avail scholarships to other qualified students.
Mr. Denteh bemoaned the challenges which the Secretariat was encountering in its transactions with beneficiaries of the institution including access to a GCTU contact person, refund of students’ financial commitments made in wait for the scholarship and others which the Head of the Scheme was to share with GCTU.
Contributing to the concerns of the Secretariat, the Head of the Scholarship Scheme, Ms. Freda Lamptey informed the University Management that the Secretariat was encountering challenges including students forgetting their emails, passwords, upload of wrong or unclear documents, lack of acceptance letters for scholarship offers and others.
These prevented beneficiaries from accessing the scholarships when the funds were ready for disbursement and therefore appealed to Management to relay their concerns to the students. She also appealed to Management not to deny beneficiaries the opportunity to write their exams since the scholarships offered them was eventually going to be paid to the University.
Reacting to the concerns of the delegation, the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Emmanuel Ohene Afoakwa noted that the University did not intentionally deny students exams access, but for audit queries that were usually raised in that regard. He requested the Secretariat to endeavor to release scholarship offer letters at the beginning of each academic year to enable beneficiaries to register and be able to write examinations, while awaiting the payment of funds from the Secretariat.
Prof. Afoakwa embraced the occasion to appeal to the GETFund to assist GCTU to improve its infrastructure to meet the increased student numbers engendered by it public status. He informed the delegation that the University had since developed new and very exciting programmes, especially in ICT ranging from the certificate to the PhD level in response to its mandate as an ICT training institution.
He assured the delegation that to reduce cost to the Scheme, GCTU had equipped itself to train professionals in tailor-made ICT programmes and therefore there was no need for the Secretariat to sponsor candidates, especially PhD students to pursue programmes in foreign institution. He further appealed to the GETFund to consider increasing the number of scholarship allocations to GCTU to enable the less endowed students to also benefit from the scheme.
In his reaction to Prof. Afoakwa’s submission, Mr. Denteh requested Management to send an official request of GCTU’s concerns to the Secretariat for consideration. Regarding scholarship allocations, he explained that it depended on the number of applications received from GCTU, the number of applicants with grade “A” and the Secretariat’s focus on achieving 70% consideration of females in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programme. He informed Management that scholarships are capped at a maximum of Gh¢20,000.00 a year while the applicant paid the rest just to ensure that eligible others could also access the scholarship.
The Former Head of the GETFund, Mr. Michael Nsowah appealed to GCTU to alert the Fund whenever any beneficiary was withdrawn or deferred his/her programme to enable the Fund to withdraw or pause the payment of scholarship respectively to save cost.
The Vice-Chancellor, on behalf of Management, expressed his profound gratitude to the delegation for offering the opportunity for such discussions on GCTU’s concerns and expressed the hope that the University’s petitions would be addressed.
