STU launches project to advance females in Engineering Programmes

The Vice-Chancellor of Sunyani Technical University, Ing. Prof. Kwadwo Adinkrah-Appiah, has announced that the university is offering a 20% discount on school fees for all female engineering students from the next academic year.

Speaking at a Students-Staff durbar held at the University’s main auditorium last Tuesday, Ing. Prof. Adinkrah-Appiah, explained that the move formed part of an affirmative action adopted by management to encourage more females to pursue various engineering courses.

He said because STU is a technical university, it usually struggles to get females to study engineering programmes and so the university has taken this affirmative action to give special consideration to prospective female engineering students.

He further explained that this would attract more females into the engineering field.

The University is, however, investing to develop a highly qualified and diversified women workforce in engineering fields complementing the national multiple initiatives, such as Girls into Science and Technology and Women into Science Engineering implemented to increase women’s participation in STEM education in Ghana.

Despite all these national efforts, women are still underrepresented in STEM. Becoming a matter of national concern, politicians, as well as academic circles, have voiced their worries over the economies, industrialisation and security due to the inadequate number of women in STEM fields.

According to some reports, women’s participation in higher education has increased in Ghana tremendously to extent that women sometimes outperform men on key educational benchmarks, however, despite these educational achievements among women, they remain underrepresented in engineering fields.



Scholars have argued that women have been kept away from engineering programs because of systemic and cultural components of engineering disciplines rather than individuals’ interests or abilities in a pre-industrial country like Ghana.

The journey of having more female to opt for engineering programs is laudable one but will not be without huge obstacles, including the traditional definition of who a woman should be, societal demands on what a woman should do, family requirements of what a woman should have, and intimidations from course mates, Considering the general but erroneous perception that engineering is the preserve of men.

In the recent past, there have been some policy interventions such as the establishment of the Science Education Unit, and the Girls’ Education Unit in 1997; coupled with non-policy interventions such as the Electricity Company of Ghana’s drive to train 100 girls in Engineering, the National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ), etc.

More recently, the Minister of Education single-handedly hunted for 100 students to be trained in engineering at the University of Mines and Technology with some percentage being female as part of the programme.

The aim of these interventions are to partly attract and train more women in the field. Ironically, the number of women in engineering in Ghana is still relatively low as women in engineering accounted for only seven per cent as of October 2020,” according to the Ghana Institution of Engineering.