This was disclosed by the Director of the GIC, Mr Richard Okyere, in his state of the college address during the 12th Convocation Dinner and Awards Ceremony of the college last week.

He expressed delight that the college had since the beginning of this year started a capacity building training programme for existing insurance sales agents of all insurance companies in the country.

He said the objective was to equip them to engage the insuring public in a more professional and ethical manner — a distinctive training module that integrated practice and ethics of the insurance trade.

A Member of the Council of State and the immediate former Chief Justice, Her Ladyship, Mrs Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, who was the Guest Speaker, challenged the graduands to demonstrate professionalism.

“Remember you have been trained to achieve the quality of excellence that would lead to sustainable industry growth. Obviously, Ghanaians would like to see responsible insurance professionals imbued with a high sense of integrity, fairness, faithfulness, transparency and diligence’, she admonished.

She also proposed that the college should incorporate Dispute Resolution into its programmes as the ‘lack of good negotiation and other Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) skills among practitioners had the tendency of impeding amenable settlement of insurance cases out of court’ as ‘there is an urgent need to strategise to find ways of reducing insurance-related litigation in our already overburdened courts”, she bemoaned.

The Commissioner of Insurance, Mr Justice Yaw Ofori, intimated that a vibrant insurance industry depended largely on the development of its human capital needs, hence the role of the GIC as a stopgap in that regard.

He also called on the graduands to be disciplined in their chosen career pursuits and that achieving academic and professional excellence in one’s career could only be guaranteed through an unmatched integrity.

Students who stood out in various modules during the academic year were recognised and presented with special awards with the Overall Best Student prize going to Mr Fred Mensah Sarpong.

Some 92 students graduated with diplomas and certificates awarded jointly by the GIC and the Malta International Training Centre (MITC), Malta.

The GIC

The GIC is the country’s premier professional training institution for insurance professionals and has since its establishment in 2006 produced close to 300 Chartered Insurers (Associates) under the UK-based Chartered Insurance Institute (CII-UK).

The GIC has a mission ‘to train, develop and mentor insurance professionals to excel in the practice of insurance profession’. Its principal stakeholders are the National Insurance Commission (NIC), the Ghana Insurers Association (GIA), the Ghana Insurance Brokers Association (GIBA) and the Chartered Insurance Institute, Ghana (CIIG).