EDITORIAL: World bank's tech skills project highly laudable
The World Bank (WB) is financing the establishment and implementation of an East Africa Skills for Transformation and Regional Integration Project (EASTRIP) in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia. Costing $293 million ($210 million loan and $83 million grant from the World Bank Group’s International Development Association), the project’s development objectives are to increase access to – and improve the quality of – technical and vocational education training (TVET) programmes, as well as to support regional integration and economic corridors.
The project targets the development of specialised technical skills in priority sectors, including transportation, energy, agricultural processing and general manufacturing, as well as information and communication technologies.
To that noble end, lecturers from the three pilot project countries will be offered 100 training scholarships in China. The training is designed and intended to ramp up their TVET skills
In that regard, 20 young lecturers were selected from the three countries last week for the first phase of the training in China.
Under the EASTRIP programme, the World Bank is also supporting 16 technical and vocational training institutions in the east African region, including the Arusha Technical College and the two Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology campuses in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza.
The China EASTRIP scholarships have a special attraction in that they are deliberately designed to fill yawning gaps, including the critical shortage of highly-qualified trainers in our TVET institutions. The project will create a core cluster of highly-qualified staff who would professionally design and deliver demand-driven training programmes in technical and vocational education training.
For their noble endeavours in this, we sincerely wish success the project’s initiators-cum-supporters, project supervisors (the Kampala-based Inter-University Council for East Africa, an EAC institution which co-ordinates the development of higher education and research, including the establishment of centres for advanced studies), and the selected scholars.
PACT REVIVAL THE RIGHT MOVE
In 2012, Air Tanzania Company Ltd (ATCL) and the National Institute of Transport (NIT) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on training aviation experts. Under the pact, the two parastatals would complement each other in training aviation personnel for the aviation industry at large.
While NIT would concentrate on the theoretical side of the training under the NIT-ATCL Joint Aviation Training Project, ATCL would dwell on the practical side, including the flying and engineering aspects of the profession. Both institutions fall under the administration of the ministry of Works, Transport and Communications. Training pilots and other aviation experts in the country has many benefits, including jobs creation and saving costs on overseas training. The MoU had the backing of crucial stakeholders the likes of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority (TCAA).
And – although ATCL and NIT were granted an Approved Training Organisation (ATO) Certificate by Tanzania’s Civil Aviation Authority – functional take-off of the project was hampered one way or another. That was until the government descended on the scene, revamped ATCL, and shooed the Covid-19 pandemic out of the way – thus enabling the two parastatals to revive the pact recently.
We wish them success in getting it done this time.
