Mampong (Ash), Feb. 14, GNA - The Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETfund) is to disburse a total of 582 billion cedis this year for the provision of infrastructure, equipment and build the capacities of tertiary institutions, Mr Ofosuba Mensah Banahene, Administrator of the Fund said on Monday.

He said the disbursements would begin immediately once Parliament gave the approval, pointing out that within the past five to six years, the GETfund had provided almost three trillion cedis to support the public universities to upgrade infrastructure, equipment and capacities to improve on access and quality of higher education.

Mr Banahene was speaking at the inauguration of projects funded by the GETfund at a cost of more than nine billion cedis at the Mampong-Ashanti campus of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW). The projects consist of a 1.8 billion-cedi two story office block, a sports complex built at a cost of more than 1.7 billion cedis, a 5.17 billion-cedi two story science laboratory and a feed-mill valued at 400 million cedis.

The GETfund was established by an Act of Parliament (Ghana Education Trust Fund Act 581 of 2001) to assist mainly with the nationwide financing of education.

Mr Banahene pointed out that the GETfund's role was to complement government efforts in providing the needed resources for development and not to take over government's primary role of making budgetary allocation for the development of educational infrastructure. The GETfund Administrator urged the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) of the universities and other tertiary institutions to continue to impress on government the need to provide funds for infrastructural development.

He appealed to students to appreciate the efforts being made by government and the GETfund to improve on conditions in the various campuses for sound academic and social work and to desist from acts of vandalism that 93tend to pull back the clock of progress". Speaking at the ceremony, Professor Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, Vice Chancellor of UEW said the provision of quality education continued to dominate the agenda of social policies of governments the world over. He indicated that the establishment of the GETfund as a basic instrument of education delivery in Ghana was timely, highly commendable and in line with global trends.

Professor Anamuah-Mensah said he was particularly impressed with the major infrastructural transformation that had taken place in almost every tertiary institution in the country, since the inception of the GETfund.

The Vice Chancellor appeal to the managers of the GETfund to now pay more attention to the funding and utilization of research, as he put it, 93 so that the frontiers of knowledge of science and technology could be extended for the socio-economic development of the country". He said as an agro-based nation, agricultural research was most fundamental to sustaining the livelihoods of the rural and peri-urban poor, who continued to use 93very elementary means of production". The Principal of the Mampong College of Agriculture of the UEW, Professor Ambrose Tuah, thanked the GETfund and other partners for providing the College with the needed infrastructure befitting its status and appealed for more support to build the capacities of lecturers and other staff.