A former Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, has urged the government to provide adequate funding for public universities to enable them to undertake research that can drive Ghana’s development, particularly in the area of technology.
He described the current funding model where universities appear to rely heavily on tuition fees as worrying.
He stressed the need for the state to finance the institutions while holding them accountable for results.
Delivering the keynote address at the 14th Professor John Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture in Accra on Wednesday, Prof. Frimpong-Boateng said public universities were chronically underfunded.
As a result, he explained, many institutions had resorted to charging students as their primary, and in some cases, sole source of income.
He noted that this situation placed a heavy burden on students, particularly those from less privileged backgrounds, adding that many were effectively denied access to tertiary education because they could not afford the fees.
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng said successive governments under the Fourth Republic had failed in their responsibility to invest in the country’s institutions.
He argued that, despite frequent rhetoric about human capital development and inclusivity, the system had been structured in a way that shut out many young people whose talents were needed for national progress.
“A nation that cannot educate its own children has no credible claim to development,” he stated.
Touching on research institutions, Prof. Frimpong-Boateng said they faced similar challenges.
He cited the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC) as examples, noting that these bodies, which should be leading Ghana’s technological transformation, had been compelled to commercialise their activities just to survive.
He described this approach as a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works and how nations develop.
According to him, no country that had achieved significant technological advancement had done so by requiring publicly funded research institutions to generate their own revenue.
He pointed to countries such as South Korea, China and Singapore, explaining that they invested heavily in research institutions and focused on outcomes rather than revenue generation.
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng also raised concerns about the situation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he said had been left to operate without adequate financial support.
He explained that the agency now struggled to pay its staff and fund its regulatory responsibilities.
As a result, he said, it had increasingly relied on issuing permits as a means of generating revenue.
The consequence, he added, was that the EPA lacked the capacity to carry out effective oversight, undertake proper environmental impact assessments or enforce compliance with regulations.
He warned that such a situation undermined the agency’s core mandate of protecting the environment, biodiversity and public health.
BY BERNARD BENGHAN
ollow our WhatsApp Channel now! https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAjG7g3gvWajUAEX12Q
