Give more opportunities to the disadvantaged

23-01-08
Page 11

THE Director of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex in the UK, Prof. Louise Morley, has stressed the need for higher institutions to give more opportunities to the disadvantaged in society.
That, she said, was to ensure equal access to higher education on the continent.
She was speaking on “Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard” at a national dissemination seminar in Accra.
It was aimed at disseminating part of the objectives of a three-year project, with a view to exploring factors that facilitated or impeded participation in higher education, and to examine the different approaches taken by state and private providers towards widening participation.
It was also aimed at interrogating universities about what they were doing in relation to poverty reduction and achievements of the Millennium Development Goals.
The project, funded by the Department For International Development (DFID), is to investigate interventions for widening participation in one public university and one private university in Ghana and Tanzania.
Prof Morley said looking at the countries on the continent, they tended to focus more on basic education, adding that higher education was equally important as it developed the expertise for wealth creation.
On the issue of gender, she said, in Africa, women were still under-represented in higher institutions unlike the UK and other parts of the world.
The Dean of the Faculty of Education of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Prof James Opare, said the findings of the project would be presented to policy-makers for consideration.
He said once higher education was given the needed attention, while opportunity was created for the disadvantaged, poverty would be reduced in the long run.