The Government of Ghana, in the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy II, focuses on three pillars including Human Resource Development and Private Sector Competitiveness. This is reflected in the 2007 Budget where the Government channels its resources mainly to education and the creation of an enabling atmosphere for private sector competitiveness. The finance and banking sector in the past couple of years has experienced very substantial expansion from both demand and supply sides. One of the major sources of the increase on the supply side is the emergence of the microfinance institutions across the continents of developing countries.

In Ghana, a critical step in this direction was the launch of the Microfinance and Small Loans Centre; and currently the drafting of the Ghana Microfinance Policy Document which is in its final stages prior to submission to Parliament. Strengthening human capacity within the microfinance industry has been identified as the paramount tool to achieve the intended goals of income redistribution and poverty reduction. Participants during the 2006 Annual Microfinance Conference organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences commended the Faculty for organizing the conference on the theme “Microfinance Capacity Building for Poverty Reduction”. This culminated in the successful mounting of a final year elective course on Rural Microfinance and the establishment of the Professional Certificate and Professional Diploma Sandwich Programmes by the Department of Economics. The 2007 Annual Conference also witnessed an increase in participation and this further deepened the need to sustain the intervention being made by the University in the sub-sector.

To sustain the programme the Department of Economics has identified the lack of resource persons vis-à-vis the large number of courses taught as the two major challenges. The Department currently relies on external resource persons for about 90 per cent of the teaching in the microfinance programmes. This is as a result of the practical oriented nature of the programme. This does not offer the Department the option of choosing from a wider spectrum of facilitators and thus poses a threat should an external facilitator fail to honour a call.  In its bid to overcome these challenges, running a Masters Sandwich Programme prior to the development of a Bachelors Programme is the most appropriate solution. This will afford the Department the opportunity to train potential resource persons and also spread the programme over a longer period. The Masters’ Programme will take the form of a training of trainers with the motive of absorbing and increasing the number of potential facilitators. Exceptional graduates will be encouraged to write a year’s thesis after the course work for the award of Master of Philosophy degree. This will bring on board qualified and in-house facilitators for the entire microfinance programme. The ambition is to create a Centre of Excellence in Microfinance for the West Africa sub-region. This centre will be comparable to similar institutions based in Uganda Martyrs University and University of Pretoria for the Eastern and Southern sub-regions respectively