Skills. Yes, we do need them as a country and economy, for the present and the future, including saving the planet.
The latest we have from the BTVET ‘alliance’ (https://www.education.go.ug/btvet/ )is the modular training plan: a P.7 (Primary seven) leaver can attend a welding course ‘module’ for a few months, enter the world of work, then ‘upgrade’ in due course. This is wrong and wrong. For starters, the entire programme needs reorienting. The ‘B’ (Business) in BTVET is misleading while the ‘V’ (Vocational) is redundant. The B is misleading both in theory and practice.
In theory, because the curriculum is oriented, rightly so, to technical education, not to business education. The ‘business’ insertion came at the peak of the ‘self-employment’, and ‘job-creation’ hype, garnished with the motivational speech fad. Truth and reality do tell us that these have had their day, and left us poorer and more vulnerable than they found us. The B was inserted with the lure that graduates of technical education would be motivated into ‘starting their own business and ‘creating jobs’.
It misleads in practice because as the current modular arrangement holds, a P.7 leaver who attends a few months of welding or brick-laying and moves into ‘self-employment’ is both a potential danger to the users of his products and a chain link in the perpetuation of mediocrity, collapsing buildings and all.
Moreover, he will be a child under Ugandan law. The ‘V’ is redundant because here, ‘vocation’ is non-defined and misconceived. No wonder it is at times pronounced ‘vacational’, even by big people. With its etymology in the Latin verb vocare (to call), a vocation is a calling. It is neither a skill nor a talent. It is neither a trade nor a craft. It is neither a job nor an occupation. It is neither a profession nor a practice. It is neither devotion nor adherence. It is a calling.
A calling here means doing beyond fulfilling the basic needs of survival, the standard job description, or material gain motivation Thus, one can fulfill their vocation through their talent, job, profession, skill, occupation, devotion, trade, and practice. An athlete who motivates and facilitates another 100 youngsters to discover and develop their talent has lived to his vocation. Thus limiting ‘vocation’ to technical education renders the concept and meaning of vocation very narrow.
Let us delete B and V, we add A. The ‘A’ here is Apprenticeship. We thus have Technical Education Training and Apprenticeship (TETA). Virtually all the courses currently taught and examined under BTVET are practical courses. It, therefore, follows that the trainees need a component of practical application commonly called industrial training.
Most BTVET schools have no structured apprenticeship plan for their students. Students are left to fend for themselves, the only support being an introduction letter from the school/institute. Students find it hard to get attachments into companies or workplaces within easy reach of their examiners. Under TETA, the training institutions will enter into structured partnerships with the relevant private sector companies, to have their students attached as part of the training.
To finance this apprenticeship, the government must establish a national skilling fund, modelled on Kenya’s NITA (National Industrial Training Authority https://www.nita.go.ke/ ) Fund. This is a mandatory annual non-refundable contribution from employers, for manpower skilling in all domains at all levels: hard and soft skills, a total KSA(Knowledge-Skills-Attitude) package. Ugandan employers should welcome this. It’s in our national interest. This fund will also finance Craft Guilds where fresh graduates work under structured supervision, not isolated scattered petty businesses that make us uncompetitive against imported industrial rejects and ‘mitumba’.
© Ben Matsiko Kahunga 2022
Email: isherugaba@gmail.com
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