Government has signed a loan agreement worth €127 million to expand and upgrade all Technical and Vocational training institutions across the country.
This was made known by a Deputy Education Minister, Gifty Twum Ampofo during a Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) event in Accra last Friday supported by the European Union (EU) and the German Development Corporation agency (GIZ).
Under this agreement, three new TVET excellence centres are expected to be constructed beginning in September this year aimed at creating an enabling environment for a number of the youth have access to technical and vocational education. Part of the facility will also go into re-training of teachers, capacity building, career counselling and retooling.
This forms part of government’s commitment to retool the vocational and technical training sector which also forms the basis of spearheading the One District One Factory (1D1F) agenda. The 1D1F is meant to make Ghana an industrial hub; this game changer is expected to surge if it is supported by vocational and technical institutions that are primed to instill in the relevant human resource skills.
Technical and Vocational training is expected to equip people with the requisite driven skills that are on demand in the labour market. However, many of such institutions in the developing countries are inadequate and lack the various resource to instill the relevant knowledge on the youth.
In addition, demand-driven technical skills are lacking. As a result, businesses are having to retrain graduate recruits.
A number of people trained through such system do not acquire the needed skills and competences due to some limited factors which include the lack of private sector involvement in the training and missing linkages to formal and informal businesses.
It is as a result of this the event was organized to get the private sector to actively participate in the process by building capacity and channel the needed support towards the growth of the sector.
By Dundas Whigham
