Vocational education and training - VET

This leaflet provides an overview of the BEAR III project’s activities from 2023 to 2027 in four West African beneficiary countries: Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, emphasizing its expected impacts. The document outlines targeted sectors in each country, focusing on enhancing the quality and relevance of TVET programmes to better appeal to youth, businesses, and society. At the core of the project is the adoption of a sector skills development approach, with efforts concentrated on key economic sectors identified in collaboration with national governments and TVET stakeholders to align with strategic agendas.

This paper seeks to shed light on the current challenges faced by eight selected sub-Saharan African countries, namely Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, in achieving the integration of women into the labour market through education and training. 
This paper aims to present a diag-nosis of women’s situation in terms of their integration into the labour market. It will focus mainly on the role played by educa-tion and training in attaining gender parity and identify practices that will potentially address the marginalization of women in the labour market.Abstract

Many Sub-saharan African countries are facing huge challenges in creating relevant education and employment opportunities for their young and fast growing population. Demand for jobs outpace growth in job opportunities. While many of the jobs available are in technical and fields, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is generally not leveraged effectively for a range of reasons - including lack of legislative and political support from the state, outdated curricula, insufficient public-private partnerships and undesirable perception of TVET among the public. However, even in the face of these challenges, there are a number of successful initiatives operating in TVET.

Recommendations to improve the state of TVET in this part of the world could be to recognize and support formal as well as informal TVET paths in order to improve its image. Also, the private sector could play a huge role by becoming more engaged in TVET through offering more internships, apprenticeships etc.

Last but not least, it seems important to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in the African youth, to move from job search to job creation.

This report provides an overview on the state of TVET in West Africa (focusing on Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast) and highlights examples of successful models and good practices from the ground.

If our universities fail to review the current curricula and policies, then they should be blamed for the high rate of unemployment that will hit ou

Attacks on education in West and Central Africa have increased in the past 10 years and universities have not been spared, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO.

Issuing the warning at the end of February in several briefing papers, UNESCO stated that most of the attacks occurred in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger and Nigeria and were perpetrated by armed conflict groups and government armed forces.

In one of the background papers, ‘Safeguarding education: Policy and data landscapes for the protection of education from attack in West and Central Africa’, UNESCO noted that, since 2017, armed Islamist insurgent groups have been targeting the higher education sector in Burkina Faso. Universities that have been forced to suspend classes from time to time include Dori University and the University of Fada N’Gourma.

In Cameroon, armed separatist groups driven by concerns about the marginalisation of the English-speaking north-west and south-west regions of the country have been engaged in a boycott of education since 2017.

The University of Buea and the University of Bamenda, which are located in those areas, have been under attack several times. According to UNESCO, attacks on education in the far north region of Cameroon have also been carried out by Boko Haram, spreading over the border from Nigeria.

Similarly, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, attacks on education have escalated since 2012, following the outbreak of conflict between the M23 rebel group and the Congolese armed forces, or FARDC, and institutions in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri have been the most heavily impacted. “Attacks are carried out by the FARDC, M23, Hutu militia groups, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, and the Allied Democratic Forces,” says UNESCO.

In Mali, schools and universities are also exposed to rebel attacks. Last year, the United Nations reported that about 1,500 out of 9,000 schools in the country were closed or non-functional as a result of insecurity, disrupting the education of half a million learners.

One of the higher education institutions at risk in Mali is the prestigious L’Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Recherches Islamiques Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou (Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research) in Timbuktu, which is still recovering from a 2012 attack. According to UNESCO, the institute has manuscripts of the history of Mali dating from the 14th and 16th centuries.

This paper identified emerging development in utilizing information technology towards the forceful dispersal of information relating to vocational skills. It focused on a significant challenge of generating funds from vocational skills. The paper justified the need for a system that provides relevant information relating to vocational skills to the learned and unlearned and generating income for those who possess the skills in a case study. The paper encapsulates a vis-a-vis oral interview and a focus group method addressing students of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, with dexterous vocational skills, as well as vocational workers at the vocational centers within the OAU community in order to know their views on showcasing their skills on a web platform. Overall data were collected from 176 respondents, with 40 students who have vocational skills responding, and the remaining 136 responses from the vocational workers who are not students. The analysis attests to the fact that it is crucial to have a platform that allows people to showcase their potentials, vocational skills, dexterity, and talents.

Announcing a review of university curricula aimed at addressing graduate employability in Nigeria, Professor Abubakar Rasheed, executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), said last month the government was concerned about complaints by industry employers that the country’s graduates were “unemployable”. How did the country reach this point?