BQA shifts cost to cost recovery
Correspondent | Monday June 27, 2016 15:20
The new regulations that set the BQA on the path to cost recovery appears on the Government Gazette of June 17.
The manager stakeholder relations at BQA, Selwana Pilatwe-Koppenhaver explained that indeed there has been a change of policy in relation to fees charged for services provided by the Authority.
“In the past, fees for services charged used to be based on cost sharing with regulated entities. The Board then took a position of cost sharing. These new figures are based on actual cost of providing the service to the clients. The stated fee of, for example P25, 000 for a workplace training provider, is valid for a period of 10 years that the licence is valid for. This effectively translates to an annual fee of P2, 500. These figures apply for the validity period of registration and accreditation, 10 years for institutions and five years for individual trainers and Pilatwe-Koppenhaver stated that before these fees were sent for gazetting by the Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD),“extensive consultations were done with stakeholders countrywide, which include public and private Education and Training Providers, Botswana Association of Private Tertiary Education Providers and public and private employer agencies”.
She said the fees were benchmarked with regional (SADC) and international regulatory authorities that do similar work as BQA.
The regulations will see colleges and universities paying between P20,000-P40,000 depending on size of intake, for registration and accreditation once in 10 years. The tertiary institutions shall also pay between P40,000-P80,000 annually for audits, while an extra fee for registration and accreditation of an additional site shall fetch a further P30,000, for tertiary institutions. Before the coming into force of the new regulations, applications for accreditations for training institutions was P7,500 and P5,000 for consultants, while application for additional site not covered in the initial application was P3,500. There shall also be more fees for larding programmes running for every five years and these include P30,000 for A Level Certificate, P40,000 for Diploma, P60,000 for Degrees, P65,000 for Degree and Post Graduate Certificate and Diploma, as well as P70,000 for Masters Degree and P80, 000 for Doctoral Degrees programmes.
BQA shall also bill educational institutions for reviews of curricular materials, the sum of P1,000 per document or programme. The previous regulation had set a flat P1,000 fee for evaluations of programmes, as well as P250 per module’s accreditation.
Furthermore, lecturers or instructors in educational institutions will be required to be accredited, a process that will see locals paying fees amounting to P1, 000 for evaluations of qualifications, while their foreign counterparts shall pay P2, 000. This used to be P300 for locals and P500 for non-citizens
Educational institutions shall also pay P5, 000 a day in the event of an investigation instituted against that institution and resulting in the institution being found guilty.
Operators of pre-schools shall be levied P10,000 for registration and accreditation, P5,000 for audit, P8,000 for accreditation and registration of a new site.
For providers of primary and secondary school education (private and public), this will fetch P20,000 and P30,000 respectively for registration and accreditation, as well as P10,000 and P15,000 respectively for audits, while an extra site would fetch another P15, 000 and P20, 000 respectively.
Currently there are over 1,500 government -run primary schools, over 1,000 junior secondary schools, over 22 senior secondary schools and over 40 technical colleges and brigades across the country, all of which are not exempted from the fees and regulations of the BQA.
The new regulations also govern consultants, who will pay P20,000 for registration and accreditation, and a further P20,000 for audit. A registration and accreditation of an additional site shall fetch P15,000 for consultants. However there shall be no fees for short courses. Consultants had traditionally been paying P5,000 for accreditation in the old regime. The new regulations also recognise that workplaces can be registered and accredited as training providers, and shall be charged P25,000 for registration and accreditation of a workplace as a training provider.