A few years back, I had an interesting encounter that has lingered in my mind ever since. While shooting pool with friends over drinks, this rather nice and polite bloke asked me a not so polite question.

"I think I saw you somewhere yesterday?” he said. "At the University of Women where they teach how to cook and stuff, what were you doing there…you want to cook?”

"Have you had your supper?” I countered.

"Suppose nobody was there to cook it for you, would you like it?” I got a blank stare. Point driven.

It so happens that at that point in time, I was teaching entrepreneurship at a local university that specializes in tourism and hospitality. In the eyes of the public then it was, as my pub friend put it, a place where women were taught to cook. Very gender insensitive, never mind that the university actually has an almost equal population of male students.

I know what you are thinking. You are aghast…right? You wonder what is wrong with ‘non-progressive thinkers’ like my pub friend. But are you any different?

Where do you get your office furniture from? How about at home? To be more specific, how much of your beloved possessions are locally manufactured? Are you not demonstrating the same lack of faith in our artisans and our homemade stuff.

The argument that justifies this lack of faith in our own has all along been that the quality of locally made stuff has nothing to write home about; to put it professionally, there is a skills gap.

This is what TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) was introduced to address.

Rwanda undertook major reforms of TVET in 2008. Two concepts came up; Workforce Development Authority (WDA) and the Integrated Polytechnic Regional Centres (IPRCs).

The former was to organise and implement the national TVET strategy while the latter would develop centres of expertise at the provincial level. This has largely been done but there are still some loopholes.   

TVET has not broken the veneer of inadequacy that we have that makes us feel our products are inadequate. We still import just about everything.

Part of this problem has been attributed to management and leadership of TVET in Rwanda. It has been variably described as weak. I am sure that it is being sorted out. But I dare postulate that the problem is wider than that.

First, we must relook and rethink TVET itself. The TVET concept is ‘borrowed’. Through time it has been the concern of many a country. Its main concern was the acquisition of knowledge and skills for the world of work.

Throughout the course of history, various terms have been used to describe elements of the field that are now conceived as comprising TVET. These include: Apprenticeship Training, Vocational Education, Technical Education, Technical-Vocational Education (TVE), Occupational Education (OE), Vocational Education and Training (VET), Professional and Vocational Education (PVE), Career and Technical Education (CTE), Workforce Education (WE), Workplace Education (WE), etc.

Several of these terms are commonly used in specific geographical areas.

What is needed is for us to now tweak and adapt TVET to our situation so that it can work for us. The main challenge is the fact that people look down upon matters technical in favour of white collar stuff. This can be changed through legislation and a sensitisation campaign.

Crucially, we need to rethink the entire education system and ‘mainstream’ technical education to enable development, not only of the brains, but hands too. Indeed, if people know ‘how to do’ before they go into training for white collar degrees, it will be easier both ways.

The theory will make much sense and can be used in innovatively improving technical capacity. Theory and practice are but two sides of a coin. Indeed, the problem with management and leadership of technical education majorly stems from the fact that the managers might have not had technical backgrounds themselves.

Do we need TVET? More than you can imagine but not in its current form. It has to be revamped. We also need to consider the ‘buying Rwanda’ on a very serious note…guys make good stuff here but we still export jobs through our consumption habits…skills without markets for the products made is just about as good as a bottle of mature brandy in an evangelical bishop’s chamber.

We have work to do, a lot of work.

The writer is a Project Management and Entrepreneurship Development Consultant based in Kigali.

sam.kebongo@gmail.com