KEPSA Education Sector Board, led by the Vice Chair Ms Priscilla Kerebi, on 7^th March 2023, joined other strategic partners in a national convening that brought together key Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and Industry stakeholders to discuss how to enhance TVET-Industry relations for purposes of ensuring the smooth transition of TVET trainees to the world of work. The forum was organized by the State Department for TVET (SD-TVET) in association with Zizi Afrique Foundation and Safaricom Foundation together with other partners, at the Kenya School of TVET.

The Director, Kenya School of TVET, Dr. Edwin Tarno welcomed the participants, thanked the sponsors of the event, and assured the participants that the Kenya School of TVET continues to deliver on its mandate - to train effectively for the industry.

“The vision is to have holistically developed graduates through connections and industry-academia linkages,” remarked Dr. John Mugo, Executive Director, Zizi Afrique Foundation. Dr. Mugo congratulated the private institutions who he said have figured out how to go about TVET industry linkage and called upon public TVET institutions to learn from the private sector. He then iterated that the purpose of the conference was to develop concrete strategies on how to deal with the challenges of job opportunity inadequacy as well as the attitude and skills of the graduates. He concluded by requesting effective liaison and synergy between the relevant institutions adding that the future is co-investment.

Ms. Priscilla Kerebi, summarised her presentation into a call for a demand-driven linkage while requesting the PS for a framework that will enable a structured engagement/partnership as the private sector industry is ready for the linkage.

In his remarks, Mr. Joe Ogutu of the Safaricom Foundation noted the extreme importance of the partnership between academia and industry which cannot be underestimated. He called for evidence-based, research-based policy formulation as a way to better serve both industry and academia. He also highlighted that Safaricom will continue to partner with the stakeholders to ensure that students who come out from TVET institutions are market ready and have skills that can enable them to innovate and become employers.

The Principal Secretary TVET – Dr. Esther Thaara Muoria noted to the stakeholders that what is remaining is a decisive “marriage” between TVETs, Industry, and the working partners to produce graduates who are skilled to work in the industries or otherwise become innovators. She further asked the industry to support the dual training model citing that if possible the trainees should be up by 70% in the industry, up from the proposed 50-50 training model. She asked for support from all the stakeholders while vowing to also support as much. She concluded by mentioning that the conference was meant to leverage the stakeholders’ expertise, especially the industry in order to produce fully baked students.

KEPSA, on the Opportunities to Skill the Youth, Dr. Ehud Gachugu mentioned that building capacity and creating opportunities for the young population is extremely important to any developing country, Kenya included. He shared youth programs being implemented at KEPSA terming them as critical in shaping the future. He added that the 5th industrial revolution, calls for a shift from technology-centered to human-centered digitization, from efficiency-centered to resilience-centered innovations, and from profit-centered operations to sustainability-centered operations. As such, Dr. Gachugu called for a re-imagination of the TVET institutions to speak to this demand and urged the industry to fully support TVET institutions to deliver on this. He also put up a strong case for digitization calling upon TVET institutions to blend digital training into their curricula, mentioning that the future is digital.