Prof Oduro urges functional National Development Plan

Professor George K.T. Oduro, the immediate past Pro Vice-Chancellor of University of Cape Coast says the country must have a functional National Development Plan.

He said the plan would inform universities about the various needs of the various sectors of the economy.

Prof Oduro told the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Accra, that, the plan would also enable universities to work towards producing the required skilled labour for the various sectors of the economy.

‘‘… And with that, universities can now say that for the next five years we would produce lawyers and medical officers because the sectors need many of them,’’ he said.

The former Pro Vice-Chancellor expressed worry that universities would produce unusable graduates.

Nations, he said, invested in universities to support in the generation of the needed manpower to service its development agenda, but many countries within the sub regions including Ghana did not have human resource planning.

Human Resource Planning is the process of forecasting the future human resource requirements of an organisation and determining how the existing human resource capacity of the organisation can be utilised to fulfil these requirements.

It enables businesses to meet their current and future demands for talent, allowing human resource managers to anticipate and develop the skills most valuable to an organisation, and providing it with the optimal balance of staff in terms of available skill sets and numbers of personnel.

Prof Oduro said despite the data that the universities had, it would not make the needed impact if the nation lacked human resource.

He urged the citizenry to ‘‘pay particular attention’’ to human resource development plans for the graduates produced to fit into the needs of the society.

That, the former Pro Vice- Chancellor said, would maximise the benefits of data used by universities.