• Vocational education

Vocational education

This report summarises the main findings of two studies on Vocational Education and Training (VET) provision since the mid-late 1980s in Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

The research project covered all types of post-secondary VET provision including pre-employment occupational training mainly targeted at secondary school leavers and job-related training for those already employed. While technical colleges and polytechnics were included, universities were not.

The report finds that:

• increased institutional autonomy coupled with increased cost recovery have made public sector training provision more demand driven
• in Tanzania, the role of donors has been crucial in the overall process of VET reform. In particular, the high degree of donor-dependence of the National Vocational Training Division (NVTD) was crucial in giving donors the necessary leverage to create Vocational Education and Training Authority (VETA) and introduce the training levy
• there has been very rapid growth in private sector training provision in Zimbabwe. Compared to Tanzania, however, there has been very little effort to reform public sector VET
• public sector VET provision in Zimbabwe remains heavily supply-driven
• in striking contrast the situation in Tanzania, the government in Zimbabwe has not be prepared to relinquish its very tight control over the VET system
• in both countries there are concerns about the lack of training provision for the poor and the disadvantaged (particularly women and the disabled) and the uneven and, in overall terms, inadequate training response of enterprises.

The report provides a number of recommendations for VET reforms, including:

• in both countries there is a need for the creation of a properly functioning national training agency (NTA) which is truly national in scope and which, therefore, has a comprehensive mandate to facilitate skills development throughout the formal and informal sectors
• the NTA must develop a comprehensive training strategy that is able to identify the skills that are or will be needed in order to ensure the successful development of key sectors
• the governance and planning structures of the NTA need to be able to respond to the training needs of all the main economic sectors. Industry Training Committees should, therefore, to be established for all major industries which have clear executive authority to plan and fund training programmes that meet the primary training needs of their member enterprises
• there is a need to accelerate the pace of organisational reform among public sector training institutions; this could be done through divestiture, the public sector agency model, or internal restructuring
• there is a need to to establish decentralised planning procedures that enable employers of all types to articulate their training needs, particularly with respect to job-related training for their workforce
• a national qualifications framework similar to one that has recently been introduced in South Africa and which is based on an unified, flexible system of qualifications that encourages individuals to improve their skills throughout their working lives and thus provides career-progression and the creation of a "high skill-high participation" economy urgently needs to be introduced.

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