Parliament yesterday approved a loan facility of 123.7 million Euros for general upgrading and modernisation of vocational and technical institutions across the country.
Currently there are 34 vocational and technical institutions in the country, which are now under the supervision of the Ministry of Education instead of the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations.
Moving the motion for the approval of the loan, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Dr Mark Assibey-Yeboah, said the upgrading and modernisation of the nation’s vocational and technical institutions are in accordance with government’s commitment to reform technical and vocational education in Ghana which has wide social and economic benefits, especially to the youth.
“The project is designed to revamp vocational training infrastructure in all 34 centres across the country with world-class training equipment, content, curriculum and infrastructure, including hostels, classrooms and workshops.”
He said in line with government’s commitment to tackling youth employment, programmes are now being designed to ensure that the youth are better equipped with employable skills to meet the requirements of industry in a lower middle income and nascent oil economy.
He said that the objective of the programme is to create a sustainable, quality-oriented vocational education system that will build a highly efficient skilled society to ultimately produce highly trained manpower year after year and enhance the developmental programmes being introduced by the government.
68 million Euros of the facility will be used for retooling of the 34 vocational and technical institutions, and 2.5 million Euros for training of teachers and trainers for the institutions.
The Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu and the Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, welcomed the move by the government to invest in vocational training, stressing that it is the surest way of providing employable skills to the country’s youth who are mostly unemployed.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr