The Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) have started a three-year student exchange programme with the North Carolina Central University (NCCU) in the United States of America.
The objective of the programme is to deepen the cordial cooperation existing between the two countries.
As part of the programme, a delegation of 10 students pursuing Executive Masters in Public Administration (EMPA) and six faculty members from the NCCU is on a two-week visit to GIMPA to study the country’s public administration system.
The students will be taken through topics such as the structure of public sector management in Ghana, public sector management in Ghana; governance and decentralization, Ghana’s socio-cultural practices, ethics and integrity in local governance, politics and bureaucracy in public service delivery.
Other topics to be discussed are the role of no-governmental organizations in national development, local governance and local development-policy analysis formulation, and local government services, public, private and community partnerships, and the National Health Insurance Scheme.
Briefing the Times on the programme, the Director of International Affairs and Association Professor of Political Science of the NCCU, Dr. Emmanuel O. Oritsejafor, said the university wants its students to study the public administration systems in Ghana.
“NCCU wants the students to understand how public policy decisions are made and assessed in Ghana and examine the country’s civil service.
“The objective is that NCCU wants to deepen the global perspective of EMPA students,” Dr. Oritsejafor stated.
“We want the students to understand the comprehensive nature of the public policy process in Ghana,” he added.
He said GIMPA was chosen because its Executive Masters programme in parallel to that of NCCU.
Dr. Oritsejafor said the NCCU wanted to deepen the relationship with GIMPA in areas of research and teaching.
The director noted that the NCCU has exchange programmes with the University of Ghana, University of Cape Coast and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
Dr. Afua Kufour, a lecturer at the GIMPA Business School, who is the coordinator of the programme, told the Times “this is the first time the NCCU has initiated a programme with GIMPA”.
She noted that the collaboration would provide the opportunity for the EMPA students in NCCU to study the country’s civil service and how the public administration system was run.
