What Happened to Polytechnics? Technical universities in Ghana, open letter Part 2

In Part 1 of this letter, I told you about the IDP Study Abroad Expo and what a New Zealand university course on African resources revealed about our education system. Today, I want to address the part that has been on my mind personally.

What happened to the polytechnics?

I want to say this carefully, because I believe it is one of the most important structural failures in Ghana’s education story that we are not discussing loudly enough. The polytechnics were not an accident. They were a deliberate design decision. Institutions built specifically to produce technically skilled, practically trained graduates who could walk out of the classroom and onto a worksite, into an office, into a factory, and immediately be useful. Not useful in five years after an apprenticeship corrected what the institution didn’t teach. Useful now. On day one. That was the promise. That was the point.

And then, one by one, we converted them into technical universities. And something happened in that conversion that we have not been honest enough about. They became smaller versions of the universities we already had. Teaching the same way. Measuring the same way. Graduating students the same way. And losing, in that process, the one thing that made them irreplaceable.

The Theory vs. Reality Gap

Let me be specific. Because I studied civil engineering and I have hired engineering graduates from these institutions. A civil engineering student can now complete a full programme at a technical university in Ghana without ever visiting a construction site for structured learning. Without standing at an excavation and seeing the difference between a strip foundation and a raft foundation. Without touching a pile, without watching concrete poured under supervision and understanding why the ratio matters. They can sit in an exam hall and write about all of these things correctly. They can pass. And then they arrive on my site, and I have to teach them what the institution was supposed to teach them. The certificate says civil engineer. The site experience says first week.

It is the same with accounting. A graduate can balance sheets in an exam hall with confidence. What they have never done is sit inside a real business where the figures don’t come pre-cleaned, where a petty cash book hasn’t been reconciled in six weeks, where someone has been posting to the wrong account for three months and you have to find it before the audit. Funnily enough, in the same institution, there is an accounting department doing real work. That is accounting. The real kind. And the exam hall never showed it to them.

Just Another Bunch of Theorists

And it is not just me saying this from a contractor’s perspective. I was in a conversation recently with a colleague, I’ll call him Evans, who employs graduates directly from technical universities. He was frustrated in a way I recognised immediately. He said something that stayed with me: “These graduates come in and they are just another bunch of theorists. “Not incompetent people. Not lazy people. People who studied, who passed, who qualified, and then arrived in a real workplace and discovered that the job looked nothing like the exam. That the problems didn’t come labelled and pre-sorted. That the supervisor wasn’t going to explain what they should already know.

Evans is not alone. Ask any employer in construction, accounting, and engineering across Ghana. The conversation is the same everywhere. The certificate arrives. The readiness doesn’t always come with it. And the job market absorbs the difference. Quietly. Expensively. In lost time, in errors corrected, in frustrated employers who eventually stop hiring locally and look elsewhere.

My Personal Experience

I want to say something personal, because I think it earns the right to be said. I studied Building Technology at polytechnic. I worked in the construction industry for ten years on sites, in offices, managing projects, solving real problems with real materials in real Ghanaian conditions. Then I decided to broaden my understanding. I enrolled to study Civil Engineering. And I discovered something that genuinely unsettled me. The course was so broad that in the context of Ghana, it was almost practically unusable. Not the knowledge itself. The engineering principles are real and valid. But Civil Engineering as a programme is designed for a system, laboratories, research institutions, specialist consultancies, advanced testing facilities, that exists fully in developed countries and exists partially, sometimes barely, here. I am not saying studying Civil Engineering was wrong. I am saying the programme as currently designed assumes a context that Ghana is still building. And that gap is one more reason our graduates look abroad and find their knowledge more deployable there than here

The Galamsey Solution is in the Curriculum

This is exactly why we need to break these broad programmes down into standalone, problem-specific engineering courses built around Ghana’s realities. And nothing makes this argument more painfully clear than galamsey.

Ghana is one of the largest gold producers in the world. We have been mining gold for generations. And for generations we have watched rivers turn orange, communities lose water sources, farmlands destroyed, not primarily because miners are evil, but because the majority of small-scale miners are operating without the technical knowledge to do it differently.

What if we had a dedicated, standalone programme in Sustainable Mineral Extraction? Or Safe Alluvial Mining Technology? A course that taught a young Ghanaian how to identify gold-bearing deposits, how to extract them without redirecting rivers, how to process ore without mercury, how to rehabilitate land after extraction? That knowledge exists. It is practiced in other countries. It is being studied in the very universities I saw at the IDP Expo. But we have not packaged it, named it, funded it, and made it available to the young people of Obuasi, Tarkwa, Konongo, and every community where gold is in the ground.

A dedicated course in responsible artisanal mining could have done more for the galamsey problem than years of taskforces and military deployments. Because the root of the problem is not just lawlessness. It is the absence of accessible, affordable technical knowledge that gives a miner a different way to work. Education would have solved what enforcement has not. We are a resource-rich country producing resource-poor graduates.

Not because our students aren’t intelligent. Not because our lecturers aren’t capable but because our programmes are designed around disciplines invented elsewhere, for contexts that existed elsewhere, and imported here wholesale without asking what Ghana specifically needs.

Three questions for the Ministry

The answer is not to abandon the disciplines. It is to localise them. To break them open. To extract from within Civil Engineering a Flood Control Engineering course, a Local Materials Engineering course, a Sustainable Extraction course, and make those the entry points for young Ghanaians who want to solve Ghanaian problems. So, three honest questions for the Ministry before I close:

1. When the polytechnics were converted to technical universities, what specific protections were put in place to ensure the practical training mandate survived? And are those protections being enforced today?
2. What percentage of a civil engineering student’s four years is currently spent on actual construction sites, under professional supervision, doing real work?
3. And who is accountable when the graduate arrives in industry and the industry says they are not ready?

The resources are here. The problems are here. The young people are here. What is missing is the curriculum that connects all three. I am a building contractor. I know what a foundation designed for the wrong load eventually does. It fails quietly. Then suddenly. And by then the building is already up. Fix the foundation.

You can read part 1 of this article here.

Disclaimer: This opinion piece reflects the views of the author and not those of HeraldGH.