By Alexander Nyarko Yeboah, GNA
Accra, Dec. 01, GNA — The Sparkassenstiftung fur international Kooperation has organized a two-day symposium to start a conversation on retooling Ghana’s Non-Banking Financial Institutions (NBFI) for optimum performance.
The retooling, among others, will create a common platform for the training of staff of NBFI through a dualized vocational training which would depart from the tradition academic training module.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), the Sparkassenstiftung Regional Coordinator for West Africa, Mr. Kwang-Yung Jung, informed that this retooling of the sector was necessary because there was a gap in the real practical orientated skill development training and education of top management or board of directors levels which affected their work.
Mr. Jung observed that there was no officially accredited vocational training in Ghana for the NBFI sector and that all those in the financial sector had to study finance instead of a basic banking vocation.
Madam Akosua Darkwah, Head of Market Solutions and Organizational Development, CDC Consult, the facilitators for the symposium, said creating a common facility would give all the apex institutions one platform to train all personnel in the sector.
“What we have currently is that almost every apex has their own training system insisting to maintain it that way,” she informed.
Madam Darkwah, said the courses would be uploaded online so that people learn at home at their own pace, but it would still be part of what the system required.
She said the common platform was necessary because “currently we don’t have the standards spelling out what exactly would be looked for in a particular professional. We need to have policy makers coming in to say this is the road map, with the regulator telling us what standards they are looking at, industry coming in with the regulator to establish the standards and then accept them, and then we need to get the industry players with the commitment to take students on who would work and go to school at the same time.”
The Executive Director of Ghana Microfinance Institutions Network, Mr. Yaw Gyamfi, informed that “for 200 hundred years, no savings company in Germany had failed before, so we were wondering why it was so while ours kept struggling. It was on interrogation that we realized they were using what was called dual education. This system did more of apprenticeship or more of practical work with little theory.”
The Executive Director said NBFI platform would be pushing to get the support of the BOG and Ministry of Finance to help us in promoting this, if possible to make it a requirement for entry, once we get to that level, we will have a lot of knowledgeable people who are practically oriented to support the industry to grow.
He said when we launch the platform, every material that we would put up there would be of international quality and high level standard and tailored to the Ghanaian need
“Our game plan is that the industry is quiet big, the non-banks and microfinance groups form the biggest informal sector in Ghana and we control over 8 million clients and that is not a small thing to joke with, and with that base, we have a strong case to make everybody buy in to it,” Mr. Gyamfi informed.
He added that, “What we are doing is to complement what national banking college and others were doing, and we believe that it would be a very useful complementary platform rather than just coming in to compete with the existing structure. In that sense we would be more relevant to work within the space.”
Read Full Story
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
YouTube
LinkedIn
RSS