Mountcrest University partners SOAS to deepen transnational education
Mountcrest University College (MUC) has forged a transnational education partnership with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, to provide Ghanaian students with the opportunity to acquire international degrees while studying at home.
The partnership involves the delivery of international degree programmes that have been contextualised for Ghana. It is expected to boost career mobility and help build the capacity of the country’s human resource.
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The Founder of the MUC, Mr Kwaku Ansa-Asare, said at a dinner reception in Accra to launch the partnership that the university, which was opened in 2010, had chalked up a number of successes and the new partnership was going to enhance its role of delivering quality international education in the country.
“MUC has chalked up a number of firsts in its short period of existence; it was the first law faculty to record 100 per cent success of its pioneer law students, who took the Ghana School of Law Bar final examination in June 2016, all the students we presented passed the exams,” he said.
Mr Ansa-Asare said the partnership with SOAS was an opportunity for the country to tap into the vast experiences and successes of the University of London to help train a new crop of professionals with the right attitude towards their respective responsibilities.
Journey of MUC
Recounting the events that led to the establishment of MUC, Mr Ansa-Asare said the death of his son in 2002 under strange circumstances motivated him to establish a medical school to help train quality healthcare professionals in the country.
He explained that while his son was on admission at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, he felt disappointed by the attitude of some of the healthcare professionals who were unsympathetic to the plight of his son, who was suffering and had to send him away to South Africa for proper medical care, although he died few weeks later.
Those events, he said, challenged him and his wife to establish the university.
Mr Ansa-Asare also paid glowing tribute to former President John Agyekum Kufuor and the late Bernard Da Rocha for the various roles they played in the formative years of the university.
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Teaching and research centres
The night also saw the launch of three teaching and research centres under the SOAS-MUC partnership.
They were the Professor W. C. Ekow Daniels Centre for African Studies, the Professor Sir Roy Goode QC Centre for Commercial Law and the Professor Spyridon Flogaitis Centre for Public Law and Policy, which was established in collaboration with the European Public Law Organisation.
The centres, according to Mr Ansa-Asare, were named after the world’s leading scholars in their fields, who had also personally been involved in and supportive of the growth of MUC.
The event was attended by dignitaries from academia, corporate and international development spheres, members of the diplomatic corps and MUC alumni.
Notable among the personalities were former President J A Kufuor, Ambassador D. K. Osei, Prof. Akua Kuenyehia and Mr Azumah Nelson.
Mutual opportunity
The Director of SOAS, Baroness Valerie Amos, for her part, said the partnership between the two institutions would help strengthen the “already strong bond between SOAS and Ghana”.
She said with a changing world, academia was also bound to change and, therefore, the need to create innovative means of advancing teaching and learning such as the partnership between the two institutions.
With the partnership, Baroness Amos said Ghanaian students would have the opportunity to benefit from SOAS’s enormous teaching facilities, including its Centre of Excellence for African Studies which covered politics, law, anthropology and business among others.