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