By Lydia Kukua Asamoah, GNA
Accra, Feb 26, GNA - Dr Fred Kyei Asamoah, Executive Director, Council for Vocational Education and Training (COTVET), on Wednesday announced that all Technical and vocational Institutions will soon be re-aligned under the Ministry of Education.
The move would ensure that they were properly coordinated, to ensure a proper certification, standardization of training and relevant training to the national system and industry as well.
The bill for the re-alignment is in Parliament now and “I think it is a good bill that has the concerns of all the stakeholders and their consideration”, Dr Asamoah said.
Speaking at a national tripartite multi-stakeholder roundtable aimed at identifying and prioritising Ghana’s needs in terms of skills development interventions, Dr Asamoah said government was also upgrading vocational institutions, technical universities, polytechnics and N.V.T.Is with most of the infrastructure being upgraded and constructed.
There is also the establishment of the new state of the art TVET Centres and many other projects, all funded by the government at a cost close to half a billion dollars within a short span.
The Council for Vocational Education and Training (COTVET) in collaboration with the ILO Ghana Office, hosted the roundtable, which was aimed at identifying and prioritising Ghana’s needs in terms of skills development interventions.
The meeting therefore, brought together the expertise of national stakeholders and partners, including; industry players, policy makers, training providers and stakeholders within the TVET landscape.
Dr Asamoah, who also briefed the participants on the COTVET Five-Year Strategic Plan (2018 to 2022), said the plan came out of the Skill-up project that helped Ghana a lot to sanitise its TVET sector.
He said currently, aside the three sector councils that were established, the Oil and gas and the Automobile industry were also being looked at to enable Ghana to ensure that the exact skills needed in the country were developed and impacted to the young ones.
He called for some support from industry players, who would be the direct beneficiaries of the TVET programmes, for the TVET sector as well.
Mr Frank Kwasi Adator, National Project Coordinator, “Skill-Up Ghana” project, explained that the roundtable event, was part of activities under the “Skill -up” project introduced in Ghana in 2018 by the ILO and COTVET, and being sponsored by the Norwegian Foreign Affairs Ministry.
With the aim of moving the TVET system from a supply to a demand-driven one, the skill up, is expected to be attained by building on existing structures and strengthening institutional resources to promote a better understanding of the skills demanded in economic sectors, he said.
Through the project, the ILO is aiming at helping the system to be more relevant and effectively provide the skills needed in the labour market.
Mr Adator said as an institution that provided technical support to other institutions worldwide, the ILO decided to respond to the request of COTVET to help it establish the sector skill councils by providing funding for them.
The funding covered three sectors, namely Agriculture, Tourism and Hospitality, as well as construction.
He said in all, the COTVET would establish 22 sectors skill councils and so the tripartite meeting was to gather stakeholders to help review the Skill-Up project so far, and the five-year strategic plan of COTVET to be able to make inputs in the way forward.
He said the meeting would therefore, enable the participants to look at the priorities of COTVET and government in terms of skills development for the TVET sector “So that we can fashion out strategies to deal with the skill challenges within Ghana.”
The participants are expected to produce a proposal and an action plan, which would later be presented to the Norwegian government to seek for additional support to help move the skills development of the country forward, he indicated.
Ms Ilca Webster, Skill Specialist, ILO-Darkar said the ILO was ready as a technical agency to continue to support countries like Ghana with tools to develop its TVET sectors.
GNA
Read Full Story
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
YouTube
LinkedIn
RSS