At the end of July, the final conference for the “Department of Higher Education & Training: Mobilising stakeholders for Technical and Vocational Education and Training Dual System”, a project implemented with funds from the call of proposals launched by the HD-led “EU – SA Dialogue Facility”, was held. More than 150 participants, the Ambassador of the European Union, Dr Marcus Cornaro, representatives of the Austrian, German and Polish embassies, attended the event. The conference was held as a social dialogue platform, to address a list of five key concerns made by employer associations and trade union federations, which hamper their full involvement in Technical and Vocational Education and Training in South Africa.
The TVET project, implemented within the DF programme, was set to update the content of apprenticeship learning tools for TVET practitioners, setting qualifications and framework curricula for trades and occupations.
Since 1994, the SA has inherited a vocational training system in which the link between the labour market and our colleges had all but been broken. The lack of a structured system in the education system has created a huge gap in access to apprenticeship programmes for Vocational Education and Training practitioners.
‘’In South Africa we intend to produce at least 30,000 artisans/professionals by 2030. This is a modest number in comparison with the number of apprentices trained in many European countries, but for us it is an important target that we hope to increase over time’’, said the South African Minister of Higher Education, Ms. Naledi Pandor. She also expressed her gratitude to the Human Dynamics TA team for the smooth organisation of the call, which made the project possible.
‘’The challenge before the SA government is now to offer these developed programmes in a more integrated fashion and coordination of the twenty-one Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) to make the learning path clear, not only for the apprentice but also for the employer, their parents, and the labour market as a whole’’, said Stoyan Georgiev, Project Director for Human Dynamics.
The Dialogue Facility II programme (http://www.dialoguefacility.org/), managed by our team contributes to the strengthening of relations between the European Union (EU) and South Africa (SA) with priority aspects of the SA-EU Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) and the Strategic Partnership Joint Action Plan (SP-JAP).