The Ghana News Agency reports,the World Bank (WB) on Tuesday commended the Government of Ghana for expanding access to higher education, which has served as an inter-link with the economic growth leading to a decline in poverty.

“With about 30 per cent of its budget spent on education, Ghana has grown the number of its public and private universities tremendously between 2004 and 2011.

“University enrollment in the country has increased 13-fold, from 14,500 students to over 150,000 by 2010,” WB Vice President for the Africa Region, Obiageli (Oby) Ezekwesili stated at a conference in Accra on Tuesday.

She said across Africa, only about six per cent of the potential tertiary age group was enrolled in a tertiary institution, compared to a world average of 25.5 percent.

The WB statistics indicates that nine out of 10 countries with the lowest tertiary enrollment in the world are from Africa.

The bank therefore tasked other African governments to emulate Ghana’s success story to expand access to quality tertiary education which should serve as a mechanism for Africans to climb out of poverty.

“African Universities need to pay more attention to quality and relevance of higher education to economic growth and competitiveness...need to leverage its collective strengths across national boundaries and build linkages with existing pools of world class knowledge,” the Bank stated.

The WB therefore called for a more dynamic and visionary leadership of African universities who can establish regional collaboration among African higher education institutions to achieve excellence, particularly in science, technology and innovation.

It also tasked African governments to redefine their role whilst creating an enabling environment for private sector participation through policy, strategy, tax incentives, labour laws, access to student loans, as well as setting adequate standards, regulations, and accountability mechanisms.

“World class universities will emerge in Africa only if governments accept that these institutions have to be run by education specialists, not political appointees,” the Bank noted.

The Bank also called on African governments to do more with research grants and to help create the kind of environment which made it possible for university drop-outs like the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, to succeed despite dropping out of college.

The World Bank Africa Strategy sets out to support as many African universities as possible to attain world class status.

Professor Ernest Aryeetey, Vice Chancellor of University of Ghana, said the university sought to promote academic excellence through enhanced teaching, learning and leadership training.

“Promoting academic excellence through significantly expanded and relevant research and extension, overhaul of governance arrangements in administration, teaching and research and better management of university assets and facilities are essential."

He said, other areas the University was concentrating on included scaling-up efforts towards equal opportunity in gender and diversity, enhanced fund-raising activities at unit and central administration levels, mainstreaming and enforcement of structures and processes for monitoring and evaluation.

Prof Aryeetey said elite universities played a key role in training skilled workers to be fluent in the latest technologies and to apply their learning to industries, making a broader range of products that won customers worldwide.

The conference also stressed the importance of private sector participation in funding universities, warning that African governments would never have enough money to fund tertiary education alone.

It said the private sector had a very high stake in ensuring that students graduating from universities were, indeed, skilled workers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and not just full of big books but unable to translate their knowledge into contributions at the workplace or in society.