Marketing specialist Prince Ntiamoah Boampong has described the rising number of Ghanaian students stranded in the UK amid a funding crisis as troubling, adding that it also exposes a deeper issue—the suitability of the programmes many students choose abroad.
Contributing to discussions on GTV’s Breakfast Show, he argued that despite the benefits of global academic exposure, too many students are enrolled in courses that offer little value to Ghana’s long-term development agenda.
He noted that a systematic review of academic priorities is overdue, insisting that public funds must target disciplines critical to Ghana’s development, such as engineering, health and agricultural sciences, digital innovation, and public sector management. Supporting programmes with limited national benefit, he argued, diminishes the effectiveness of state-funded scholarships and contributes to systemic inefficiencies.
To Boampong, the funding challenges signify deeper structural issues—chief among them the lack of strategic planning and the misalignment of scholarship-funded programmes with national development goals. He urged the Scholarship Secretariat to revisit its selection and placement criteria and ensure that sponsored fields directly respond to Ghana’s human resource deficits.
Boampong proposed a coordinated partnership among universities, the private sector, and government agencies to map out the country’s priority skills, which would then inform scholarship decisions. With such alignment, he argued, Ghana can safeguard its human capital investments and guarantee that returning students bring back knowledge essential to the nation’s growth.
