Northern Corridor member states have announced steps toward human resource development and capacity building as part of efforts to end brain drain and cut costs on scholarships abroad.

The plan involves devising joint scholarship programmes in infrastructural interconnectivity projects that will be conducted by 17 centres of excellence across the region.

The plan was announced on Tuesday during a meeting of the human resource and capacity building cluster, whose purpose is to commission a draft framework that will facilitate offering of scholarships to fast-track provision of requisite skills at those centres.

In exchange of course training from all centres at least each university is expected to enroll two students from a member state who will take post-graduate designated courses in energy, transport, tourism, information and communication technology amongst others.

University of Rwanda and America’s Carnegie Mellon University Kigali branch being the only accepted centres of excellence in the field are expected to enroll students specialising in geographic information systems and other chosen courses.

According to officials, member states agreed to a mutual programme of boosting capacity building mostly in engineering.

The engineers will be expected to work in ongoing corridor projects such as railways, oil pipelines, submarine cables and optic fiber network connection.

Although no exact amount of loss incurred nor how much the region might save should they train its own citizens, the Common Area of High Education was expected to be endorsed by Heads of State at the 17th summit in Arusha.

According to Dr Celestin Ntivuguruzwa, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Education, all member countries under their respective ministries of education, labour, energy and ICT seek to promote regional education training that will cut spending on foreign expatriates.

"In our region, you have heard projects to extract petrol, mining industry, improvement of aviation services but we are still hampered by lack of capacity, we end up hiring expatriates instead,” Ntivuguruzwa said.

In common area of high education, experts have advocated for a comprehensive, harmonisation, evaluation and accreditation of course units which in the future will produce skilled personnel to compete with highly qualified foreign job seekers.

"For Rwanda as a country that relies on its citizens as the prime resources of which 70 per cent of them are youth, we need to make use of such forces by providing facilities that will help these people compete on available regional and other markets,” he added.

However, ambitious member states seeking to narrow down the skills gap are faced with high constant demand and budgetary constraints which is pushing them to source alternative funds in a drive to reduce brain drain.

Speaking to The New Times, Samuel Wanyonyi, coordinator of the project and deputy director of Kenyan Technical Education and Vocational Training, said member states will set up a fund to mobilise alternative budget besides state contributions.

"Having to go to the World Bank to look for money to train our people abroad is not necessary, we need that money here, it must be the role of our government to fund these initiatives on top of other sources,” he said.

"We will need to identify how many people we need for example in the standard gauge railway project and other projects, who will come from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda or Southern Sudan and then we jointly invest in those people instead of others.”

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