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A two-day national policy dialogue on tertiary education has been held in Accra on the theme: �Repositioning Tertiary Education for National Development�. The event, organised by National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE), in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and TrustAfrica, Senegal, was on the sub-themes: � Tertiary Education and National Development,� �Access and Quality Assurance in Tertiary Education,� and �Governance and Funding of Tertiary Education.� Addressing the meeting, the Minister of Education, Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman, called for an urgent review of the programme content of tertiary education to solve graduate unemployment. She said the country could boast of more than 114 tertiary educational institutions, and attracts 30 per cent of the country�s budget on education, hence the need for national interest in where the graduates end up. The education minister said from 2011-2012, the budget for tertiary education was GH�885.7 million and �the cost is skyrocketing� and noted that since independence, the country had witnessed not less than 12 educational reforms and not too long ago, the national focus was on basic education, explaining that dwelling only on one link of the academic chain was disastrous. She said some of the problems confronting tertiary education were exposure of students to skills that did not match labour and expressed the hope that the dialogue would help confront all the challenges. She said the transformation of the polytechnics into technical universities was a way of exposing students to the right skills for the job market and also serve the middle level manpower needs of the country to facilitate development. Prof. Opoku-Agyeman said the technical institutions would also translate research from the universities into tangible results that were relevant to the development needs of the country and serve as antidote for youth unemployment. She said Ghana must make choices about what was important for national development. The programme provided an opportunity for stakeholders in education, industry, civil society and policy makers to dialogue on issues confronting quality and relevant tertiary education in Ghana to help reposition the sector and make it more responsive to the development needs of the 21st century. The invited guests including academic luminaries locally and internationally talked on the sub-themes that would be subject matters of policy documents. In-depth papers would be developed from the conference themes to serve as source for policy briefs to the Minister of Education for consideration. Professor Clifford Nii Boi Tagoe, Chairman of NCTE, said since Ghana�s premier university - University of Ghana was established 65 years ago, tertiary education had undergone tremendous transformation. He said the progress made so far should match with the quality of the graduates produced, relevance of courses to national development and how it would address graduate unemployment. Dr Omano Edigheji, Consultant/Advisor, Africa�s Higher Education Dialogues, TrustAfrica, Senegal, said the pursuit of higher education in Africa was fraught with poor quality content, poor funding and poor attention to research, the problem of brain drain, lack of public accountability and poor response to public needs. He said rather than developing the individual, the attention of the tertiary institutions should focus on market oriented courses. Dr Edigheji said Africa had not been able to balance access to education with excellence and could not relate education with innovation. �We are, therefore, a continent of exporters instead of importers,� he added. NCTE was established by Act, 1993, as a supervisory body of tertiary education in Ghana.