April 2022 East African Regional TVET Conference

East African Regional TVET Conference on: “TVET for Self-Employment, Income, and Quality Jobs”

Dates: 28-29 April 2022 | Venue: AICC, Arusha - Tanzania

Background 

The Association of Technical Universities and Polytechnics in Africa (ATUPA), was born out of a resolution of the General Assembly of Heads of Member Institutions of the Commonwealth Association of Technical Universities and Polytechnics in Africa (CAPA) taken on 29th of August 2019 in Kigali, Rwanda. This decision was ratified by the Ministers of Education from AU member states at the Third Ordinary Session of the Specialized Committee on Education, Science and Technology (STC – EST III) on December 13, 2019 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The African Union’s STC – EST III resolved to “TAKE NOTE of the rebranding of the CAPA to the Association of Technical Universities and Polytechnics in Africa (ATUPA), and to encourage Technical Universities and Polytechnics in their countries to join this continental Association”. The mandate of the Pan-African Association is to support professional and skill development amongst members drawn from TVET institutions in Africa.
In order to stimulate exchanges of experience and ideas, the Association regularly organizes and provides forums for discussion of matters of common interests to members and stakeholders. TVET can be developed for a variety of different skillsets leading to self-employment, income and quality jobs. This ensures students develop knowledge and skills that are relevant to the current needs of our economies, which is critical to achieving development. However, in the present context, the growing disparity between the skills that are taught and the skills that are in demand is leaving millions of youth in our region without jobs and incomes. Although the demand of workforce is increasing with new set of skills in emerging industries, many of the youth do not meet the expectations. As a result, the gap between the job market and job seekers is widening and it has been a challenge for skills development practitioners, policy makers, planners and researchers.

Regional TVET Conference

There is the need for TVET to bridge the gap between job market and work force. Nevertheless, in many of our countries the TVET sector has not been able to perform to its best. Although governments have acknowledged the need for development of the sector, they face many problems, such as inadequate resources, limited private sector and industry engagement and the challenge of interlinking skills and the job market. There could be many reasons for this poor performance including institutional governance challenges, absence of strong backward and forward linkages, low social image, innovation and modernization challenges among others. More importantly in our developing countries, there is data and knowledge constraints and consequently, the TVET development efforts are carried out without the benefit of relevant timely data to inform policy, resulting in aggravated cycles of poor performance. It is on this background that the Association of Technical Universities and Polytechnics in Africa (ATUPA) in partnership with the African Union and the East African Community have decided to hold the 2022 East African Regional TVET Conference on: “TVET for Self-Employment, Income, and Quality Jobs” in Arusha - Tanzania on 28 – 29 April, 2022.