Mr Samuel Okudjeto Ablakwa, Deputy Minister of Education in charge of Tertiary, said the National Accreditation Board and the National Council for Tertiary Education had drawn-up new guidelines for the accreditation of new universities to meet standards.

He explained that for a new university to be approved for accreditation, “it must more or less show that it is going to give priority to science and technology in line with Government’s determination to implement and enforce the 60:40 policy guidelines”.

Mr Ablakwa said this during the Nineth Congregation of the first batch of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) graduates of the Accra Institute of Technology (AIT) at the weekend which also saw the graduation of 240 Bachelor degree holders

He said the policy guidelines were to give priority to science, mathematics and engineering programmes in the tertiary institutions.

Professor Clement Dzidonu, AIT President, enumerated the achievements of the university over the past seven years, saying: “The achievements mark not only an AIT history, but also a history in the annals of private university education in this country.

“AIT becomes the first private university in Ghana to successfully offer, run and graduate students on an internationally benchmarked PhD degree programme.

“This is no small achievement if put within the context of the fact that the PhD per capita of Ghana is just 2.72 per million population; given the fact that over 250 PhD students are now enrolled at AIT, the university has become one of the leading postgraduate research institutions on the continent.

“AIT will be graduating more PhDs in Business Administration, Engineering, and Information Technology before the close of the year”.

Prof. Dzidonu said for AIT the future was technology and that even all the humanities programmes offered by the university, majority had technology components.

He gave examples in the area of the Business Administration programmes with combined options like: Marketing and Information Technology; Human Resource and Information Technology, and Entrepreneurship and Information Technology among others.

He said about 75 per cent of the graduating class on the Bachelor’s degree programme offered in affiliation with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology were engineers and information technologists.

Professor Francis K. Allotey, the Chairman of the AIT Board of Trustees, announced the election of two eminent internationally distinguished academics to the Board.

One is Professor Goolam Mohamedbhai who is the Former Vice Chancellor of University of Mauritius; former Secretary General of the Association of African Universities (AAU); former President of the International Association of Universities (IAU) and the former Chairman of the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

The other is Professor Anuwar Ali, the former Vice Chancellor of the National University of Malaysia; former President and Vice Chancellor of the Open University of Malaysia and member of the Higher Education Council of Malaysia.

“With this new members, the AIT Board of Trustees now boasts of five former vice chancellors of world-class universities; there is no doubt that AIT has the most high-powered and academically distinguished University Board on the African continent,” Prof Allotey said.