A national tripartite multi-stakeholder round-table workshop yesterday opened in Accra to deliberate on the five-year strategic plan to build up technical and vocational skills needed for the Ghanaian market and beyond.
The objective of the workshop is to bring together expertise of national stakeholders and partners to identify and prioritise the country’s needs in terms of skills development interventions and develop an action plan document.
Welcoming participants to the workshop, Dr Fred Kyei Asamoah, Executive Director for Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET), said the world of work was undergoing major and transformational changes that a work which would be relevant today could be irrelevant in a few years.
He said this and other driving factors had necessitated a change in curriculum and skills building in technical and vocational training to meet the demands of the market.
Dr Asamoah said as a result of skills gap in the sector in April 2018, the government of Norway in collaboration with International Labour Organisation (ILO) signed a partnership agreement with the government and six other African countries on skills development which led to the implementation of a SKILL -UP programme.
He said the SKILL-UP programme supported the development skills including the development of tools and learning materials aimed at targeting vulnerable groups and ensure that skills development left nobody behind.
Dr Asamoah said the SKILL-UP programme had shown tangible results which called for the need to extend further work in the area of skills development.
He said it was in that direction that the workshop was organised to identify opportunities for development cooperation assistance in skills development to review COTVET five-year strategic plan and also identify the country’s needs and priorities on skills development.
Dr Asamoah expressed the hope that the workshop would develop an action plan to address the country’s needs and priorities on skills development.
“It is expected that a draft report including the national needs and priorities on skills development would be drawn,” he said, adding that such a document would provide inputs for resource mobilisation in the context of the SKILL-UP programme.
Lawrence Markwei
