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Decentralise legal education in Ghana, founding dean of GIMPA Law Faculty urges GLC

The founding dean of the Faculty of Law at GIMPA, Professor Kwame Frimpong, appeals to the General Legal Council to decentralise legal education

The founding dean of the Faculty of Law of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Professor Kwame Frimpong, has made a passionate appeal to the managers of legal education in Ghana – the General Legal Council – to take steps immediately to decentralise legal education in the country.

The professor made this call when he took part in a virtual conversation organised by the GIMPA Faculty of Law to reflect on legal education in Ghana ten years after the GIMPA Faculty of Law came into being, and also to celebrate him for the strong foundation he laid.


In his reflection, Professor Kwame Frimpong observed that to have a situation where authorities limit the ability to educate a considerable number of the population shows that there is something obviously wrong with the education system.

“I just don’t get why anybody will feel so proud that at the end of the day, you have about say 1,000 students who are out of the various law faculties and they have nowhere to go for their professional training and you believe that you have a right to hold on to the notion that we can admit only 500 or 250.

“It does not make sense in any system, because you are training them for the nation. It has nothing to do with your personal interests,” Professor Frimpong said.

“Fifty years ago, we had this tiny Law School which could admit only 55, and 60 years along the line we are still hanging on to that law school. Has it ever occured to anybody that we should develop about 20 different such law schools throughout the whole country, so that if you are in Tamale, as soon as you get your LLB, you go to the Law School?” Professor Frimpong asked.

“Currently, the General Legal Council does not have the resources to do that. So, simply, the law faculties should have the full authority [for] training students to the end of year five or to whatever year you want to develop. And once they complete, then we can have a body that would set the examination to determine whether you qualify to be a lawyer or not,” the legal luminary added.

The GIMPA Faculty of Law was established in 2010, and began operations on 9 August 2010 with its first cohort of students. It has grown to become the leading law faculty in Ghana according to various indices. This year marks exactly ten years since the faculty was established.

The virtual conversation with the founding dean, which culminated in a virtual citation being presented to Professor Frimpong, is one of the series of activities lined up to commemorate the GIMPA Faculty of Law’s tenth year of existence.

The highly successful GIMPA (Virtual) Law Conference 2020 on “The Banking and Financial Sector Crisis in Ghana” was held just last week, with keynote speeches from the Governor of the Bank of Ghana as well as the director general of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Other activities have been lined up and will roll out through the rest of the year.

Wilberforce Asare / Asaase Radio

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