Accra, April 01, GNA- The Chief of Staff and Minister of Presidential Affairs, Mr Kwadwo Mpiani on Saturday urged the management of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) to charge reasonable fees to enable members of the public service to benefit from the institution.

He said the rationale behind the establishment of GIMPA was to build the human and institutional capacity of the public and civil service, particularly in training first entrance to handle the administrative and managerial challenges.

Speaking at the 2nd Congregation of GIMPA, Mr Mpiani praised the institution for weaning itself from government assistance, thereby becoming purely autonomous body and self-financing.

He urged the institution to continue to instil managerial and administrative prowess into the participants to ensure that they were not only awarded degrees as government view them as an invaluable force to reckon with in the successful implementation of policies. The Chief of Staff indicted that government was committed to reforming the public sector to make it more efficient and therefore, appreciated the rapport between the sector and GIMPA in fashioning strategies to make the idea worthwhile.

The Rector of GIMPA, Professor Stephen Adei, said the institution would move from the current achievements to the pursuit of international excellence, saying recruitment of top quality faculty members had assumed greater significance this academic year as the management and council believe that they could achieve their goal of delivering to the country a world-class institution.

"New methods of teaching are being experimented which will become a standard feature of the GIMPA from 2006, these includes teaching by case study, greater use of syndicate work, enhanced critical thinking as against memorization and recall", he added.

Mr. Adei observed that infrastructure and system development was a major concern, saying it is easy to take our clean, white-washed surrounding and rapid expansion of facilities to mean GIMPA has adequate infrastructure to meet its needs to achieve international competitiveness.

" But at the moment we do not have sufficient offices for faculty, our classrooms are inadequate and we have had to use conference halls and every alley for training, we still have less than 300 hostel rooms, while standard rooms for poorer participants at 60, 000 a day are only a few," he added.

He said the institution would continue to be operationally self-financing but needed all the help for the provision of educational requirements and called for assistance from the GETFund. 'Despite the constraints, there has been positive developments in all major constituent parts of the institution, at the beginning of the academic year our business programmes were consolidated, graduate programmes under the business school had its biggest enrolment in 2005/2006 academic year and short-term executive business programmes now fully integrated into the business school," he stated.

Prof. Adei said school of leadership and public management made significant progress with the school of technology also making significant strides and the school of computer science and information technology was poised to become a leading player in training in ICT in country.

He noted that the institution had acquired defunct facilities of the State Construction Company in Kumasi, Takoradi and Tamale at about 11.521 billion in lines with its policy of extending training programmes to the regions.

The Rector stated that alumni make great universities and that a vibrant Alumni Association was urgently needed and every effort would be made to appoint a full-time officer to service alumni relations and a seat would be reserved on the 11-member council to the alumni. In all, 270 participants graduated and were awarded diploma, Masters and Executive Masters in Computer Science, Leadership and Public Management, Business Administration and Public Administration. GIMPA had since its inception depended on government subvention for the provision of educational needs, but as at now, it has been granted autonomy and run by the office of the President under GIMPA, Law 2004 (Act 676) Section (4).