Industries To Be Levied To Fund Technical Education

Friday November 13, 2009
By Kingsley Asare

The Government is to levy industries to raise money to fund Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the country, Minister of Education, Alex Tetteh-Enyo has said.

In addition, the Minister said the World Bank together with DANIDA in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and the Council on Technical Vocational Education and Training (COTVET) was initiating a skill development fund to support TVET.

This was contained in a speech read for him at a forum on achieving Better Impact of Vocational Skills Development in West Africa in Accra on Wednesday.

The forum organised by the Vocational Training for Females’ (VTF) Programme in collaboration with the Church Development Services, German non-governmental organisation and attended by participants from Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone was to discuss strategies to enhance technical and vocational education in the sub-region.

The Minister did not disclose how much the government was going to levy industries; but said currently the government was in discussion with them to set the modalities for the levy.

Although technical and vocational education held the key to addressing unemployment in the country, Mr Tetteh-Enyo said TVET has suffered many setbacks such as inadequate budgetary allocation, lack of coordination, learning material, qualified teachers and poor inappropriate infrastructure.

To reverse the situation, the Minister said for the first time in the history of the country, a TVET bill was separated from an education bill in 2005.

The TVET bill, Mr Tetteh-Enyo stipulated the setting up of the COTVET as a primordial for any reform in the TVET sector, adding that the COTVET was passed in 2006 and subsequently established and inaugurated in 2007.

Mr Tetteh-Enyo said the COTVET marked a significant landmark in the history of TVET, stressing COTVET would ensure the establishment of the National TVET Qualification Framework (NTVETQF) of the national harmonization and rationalization of all TVET activities in the country, both in the formal and informal sector.

This, he further said involved the standardization of training delivery, certifications, and informal sector training which included apprenticeship.

Earlier highlighting on a comparative study on vocational skills training conducted in Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Mrs Leticia Osafo-Addo, the chair of the VTF Board said about 30 per cent of the youth in these countries were unemployed.

The study, conducted between November 2008 and May 2009, commissioned by the Church Development Service, a German non-governmental organisation and carried out by the VTF was to ascertain the effectiveness, efficiency, relevance and impact of different approaches of vocational training in West Africa.

The study further revealed that male employment rate was higher than females and also males earn higher income than females.

Mrs Osafo-Addo encouraged the youth to take up technical and vocational training.

She also for a better policy on technical and vocational training and also called for more budgetary allocation to the sector.

Posted under

Comments