By 2025, 330 million young Africans will be eligible to enter the labour market.  This means that more jobs need to be created to absorb the manpower and more food needs to be produced in order to counter food insecurity.

“How we respond to this challenge and opportunity by improving the agricultural technical and vocational education and training is very crucial,” said Mrs Estherine Fotabong, NEPAD Agency’s Head of Directorate for Programme Implementation and Coordination. 

Mrs Fotabong was speaking earlier this month at a two-day Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education and Training (ATVET) workshop on scaling up the current pilot implementation from 2014 to 2016.   The expansion of ATVET into more African countries will focus on curriculum development in agriculture at national level.

ATVET was launched as a project of NEPAD in 2012, with the support of the German Development Cooperation (GIZ).  It has since been piloted in Ghana and Kenya where local experts conducted agricultural technical and vocational education and training assessments.  This was done by analysing ATVET system characteristics; governance and national contexts; financing; participation, access and outcomes; provision of quality ATVET, as well as its impact.   The importance of this analysis is in the collection of data and information regarding teachers’ and instructors’ profiles, their numbers, programme quality and impact in order to gain initial benchmarks for the broader rolling out of NEPAD ATVET policy processes in selected countries. 

The successful approaches in the two pilot countries will then subsequently be extended to other partner countries. CAADP is the AU-NEPAD long-term plan to improve food security, nutrition, and increase incomes in Africa’s largely farming based economies. It does this by raising agricultural productivity by at least six per cent per year and increasing public investment in agriculture to 10 per cent of national budgets annually. Since its establishment in 2003, over 40 African countries are actively engaged in CAADP at different levels and agricultural growth has spread to several African countries.

Also speaking at the ATVET workshop in Pretoria, Mr Martin Bwalya, Head of CAADP at NEPAD, said that the goal of the workshop was to develop a strategy for rolling out ATVET into more African countries as part of meeting the overall CAADP objective of growing agriculture on the Continent for job and wealth creation, as well as food and nutrition security.

Mr Ousmane Djibo - GIZ-CAADP Programme Manager - drew attention to domestic financing and investment that are crucial for success in reaching sustainable growth in agriculture.  Mr Djibo emphasised that, “Another condition for growth is investment in human resources – how farmers are using their assets and smallholder farmers should become agri-preneurs.”

The GIZ Advisor at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in Germany (BMZ), Mr Harald Pfisterer echoed the workshop’s participants’ consensus on the need for ATVET’s doors to be opened for other key players to come on board on undertaking this enormous task.   This cooperative task includes NEPAD, agricultural private sector associations, individual private companies, farmer organisations, training service providers and development partners.

Country presentations from Namibia, Sierra Leone, Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya reflected the important role of vocational education and training in responding to Africa’s challenges of rural unemployment and income disparities; food and nutrition security; and climate change.  The workshop closed with a firm commitment to mainstream vocational and technical education within national agricultural investment plans.

Contact:

Abraham Sarfo

CAADP ATVET Advisor

Abraham.sarfo@nepad.org