We’ll focus on developing new programmes — Prof. Nyarko-Sampson

The Vice-Chancellor (VC) of the University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD) at Somanya in the Eastern Region, Professor Eric Nyarko-Sampson, says the priority of the university for the next four years will be the development of new programmes.

Those programmes, he explained, would be those related to the mandate of the university within the environment, agribusiness and sustainable development space.

“So, moving forward, I’m working with the academic faculties to look at what we need to do and where we need to go. We also want to go into the postgraduate programmes.

“Currently, we have five of them under review with our regulator, which we will roll out once we get the approval,” Prof. Nyarko-Sampson told the Daily Graphic in an exclusive interview. 

Collective responsibility

The interview was for the VC to share his focus and plans for the next four years for his second tenure as VC of the university.

Prof. Nyarko-Sampson has ended his first tenure as the foundation VC of the university and has been given the mandate for another four years alongside with the university’s Registrar and Director of Finance.

He explained that the extension of his tenure as the VC was a result of genuine commitment, hard work and a determination to succeed by the management and staff of the university.

Prof. Nyarko-Sampson said the extension of his mandate for another four years was a result of the collective responsibility of both management and staff to work to ensure that the university succeeded in finding a firm footing during the last four years.

Achievements

Answering a question as to whether he was able to achieve all that he set out for himself in the first four years of his tenure, the VC said, “Yes, I will say to a larger extent because there was nothing to rely on when I came.

“I called it keys to empty rooms. The three of us came and we had to recruit the staff, we had to publish for students and at least, looking at where we are now and what we have made, we would have gotten some of the things done,” he said.

The VC explained that, for instance, the strategic plan of the university arose from his initial vision as the foundation VC, “and having put that into a plan for council to approve and working with it, I will say that to a larger extent, we have achieved some of them.”

On his most rewarding achievement, Prof. Nyarko-Sampson said it was the effort to be able to galvanise the background experiences of all the staff of the university to work towards achieving the goals of the university.

He said currently, the university has a total of 385 staff, “But mobilising each of them to get to the work that they are supposed to do needed some kind of skill and required some effort and so having been able to coordinate all the affairs for us to get this far, I think is a great joy for me.”

Academic Programmes

Touching on the academic programmes run by the university, Prof. Nyarko-Sampson said he was committed to running academic programmes that were accredited by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC).

“As I speak, we run 20 academic programmes of all the 24 academic programmes for which we sought accreditation and were given so that gives me much joy on what I set myself to do,” he said.