Professor Philip Duku Osei, the Vice Chancellor of the Simon Diedong Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies (SDD UBIDS), has appealed to the British government to consider scholarship opportunities for female students pursuing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at the university.
Prof. Osei explained that the school had introduced ICT to contribute to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education to live up to the standard proposed by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) in terms of gender parity.
The Vice-Chancellor made the appeal during a visit of the United Kingdom (UK) High Commissioner to Ghana to the school.
He observed that the school had been doing its best in ensuring gender parity including its admissions, but added that a scholarship package for the females in the ICT education at the school would be of great help towards addressing the gender parity in STEM that the country and world desired to achieve.
“Our contribution in the area (of STEM) is ICT and it’s a faculty that we have recently set up. As such ICT area, I think is a critical area for bringing about that kind of parity that we are looking for.
“I there say that this is a critical area for some form of strengthening capacity development on favour of women because women are equally keen in studying ICT and we will be happy, from Chevening Scholarship we have something directed to supporting women in this critical area”, he explained.
Professor Kennedy Alatanga, the Dean of the Faculty of Planning and Lands Management of the SDD-UBIDS also appealed for scholarship and other financial support for lectures at the university to peruse higher education in the UK to help develop their human resource base.
He said the cost of studying in higher education especially the Ph.D. at universities in the UK was exorbitant hence the need for support in that regard.
Master Kwesi Majeed, the SDD-UBIDS local National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) president also stressed the need for scholarship opportunities for the students and exchange programmes between the UBIDS and universities in the UK to help give the students global exposure.
For her part, H. E. Harriet Thompson, the UK High Commissioner to Ghana, noted that the British High Commission had been working in collaboration with the Ministry of Education to help strengthen the educational system in Ghana.
H. H Thompson, who was also the non-resident Ambassador to Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso, therefore urged the students and the university to be in constant touch with the British Council and its media handles for information on scholarship opportunities.
She also encouraged the students to take advantage of the Chevening Scholarship programme as the application for the programme was currently ongoing.