Mushrooming medical schools and forged foreign degrees: Ghana's Medical and Dental Council on both ends of the pipeline

Ghana's regulator has had to warn the public twice over — once about medical schools inside the country, and once about medical degrees coming into it.

In February 2022, Ghana Business News and 3News reported the Medical and Dental Council's warning about the "mushrooming" of medical training schools, many operating without the Council's authorisation. The Council's acting registrar asked anyone seeking medical training to enrol only in institutions accredited by the National Accreditation Authority (now the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission), and to check the list of accredited schools published on the Council's website before paying. A school that exists, teaches and charges fees is not thereby a school whose graduates the Council will register.

Three years later the problem had reversed direction. In September 2025, MyJoyOnline reported that the Council had detected fraudulent applications from people claiming to have trained as doctors abroad and seeking registration in Ghana. Four cases were under investigation, including one in which the spouse of a diplomat was alleged to have forged qualifications from institutions in Nigeria and Ireland; another involved fraudulent documents from Ukraine submitted to the tertiary education commission; others involved forged permanent certificates and examination results. The Council said document vetting had produced "prima facie evidence of forgery and fraudulent misrepresentation", credited cooperation with foreign regulators for the discoveries, and listed four alleged unqualified practitioners already facing prosecution. Those named are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The Ghanaian Times adds the third piece: 157 foreign-trained Ghanaian doctors failed the Council's registration examination in a single sitting — graduates of real foreign programmes who could not demonstrate the standard at home. That is not fraud, but it is the outcome an agent's "recognised abroad" promise quietly ignores.

For a Ghanaian student, or any West African student, the sequence is: check the destination against the Council's list of recognised foreign institutions before paying anything; understand that registration at home depends on passing the Council's examination, whose pass rates by institution are the most honest measure of a school; and never accept a document — an admission letter, a transcript, a certificate — that you cannot have the issuing institution confirm directly. Regulators now verify with each other, as the 2025 cases show; a forged qualification is a delayed criminal charge, not a shortcut.