<<Print>>

Mr Alex Tettey-Enyo, Minister of Education, has expressed concern over the limited capacity of African educational institutions to meet the increased social demand for higher education on the continent. �If the enrolment in tertiary education in Africa is only 3.5 per cent of the college-age group, then we are not fully developing and benefiting from the human resource potential of our people,� he said. The Education Minister said this at the Africa-US Higher Education Initiative Partners Conference jointly organized by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Higher Education for Development (HED) in collaboration with the Africa-US Higher Education Initiative and the Association of African Universities (AAU) in Accra. The conference, under the theme: �Reshaping Human and Institutional Capacity Building through Higher Education Partnerships,� is aimed at providing a forum for participants to present their development strategic plans for long-term collaboration with relevant stakeholders and donors interested in the development of higher education in Africa. Mr Tettey-Enyo said higher education institutions were the hope for the engineering and empowering of African countries to overcome challenges confronting the continent. �They are the reservoirs for skilled human resources for socio-economic development of the continent,� he said, and called for �stepped-up� efforts in order to reform and energise the education sector so as to confront challenges facing the continent. Mr Tettey-Enyo said in spite of efforts made to revamp the educational sector on the African Continent, challenges such as low enrolment ratio, weak infrastructure to support Information Communication Technology (ICT), ageing faculty and brain drain still remained to be addressed. Other challenges, he noted, included weak support for research and development, poor linkages of programmes with social and productive sectors of the economy as well as weak technical and vocational education and training facilities for industrial expansion. Mr Donald Tietelbaum, the US Ambassador to Ghana, underscored the importance of higher education and stressed that it was important in making companies more competitive and played a crucial role in the employment sector. �Education is fundamental to what we want get done. It is a single-graded source of social mobility in the US and we want to replicate that in other countries in the world,� he said. Prof Clifford Tagoe, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, called for deregulating, rehabilitating and expansion of the existing educational infrastructure and facilities of tertiary institutions as a way of creating enabling environments for higher education. He said African Higher Education Institutions had formed international partnerships as a step to ensure that higher educational institutions in Africa provided solutions to the socio-economic problems facing the continent. The over 150 participants at the conference are expected to plan policies that would strengthen working relationships between higher education institutions, USAID Missions, the private sector and other stakeholders interested in higher education in sub-Saharan Africa. The conference would also provide a forum for 20 partnerships to present their initial strategic plans for long-term collaboration with stakeholders and donors interested in African higher education development.