The Sunday News
Johnsias Mutonhori, Gweru Correspondent
THE Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Professor Amon Murwira has urged tertiary institutions to embrace skills that help to address problems facing the country, saying education that is divorced from societal needs was useless.
Speaking during a graduation ceremony at Kwekwe Polytechnic on Thursday where 1 852 graduates were conferred with diplomas from different programmes, Professor Murwira said the Second Republic implemented Education 5.0 system which was industry oriented adding that education that does not have its roots on the needs of society was not useful. Of the 1 852 graduates, 60 percent were males.
“The Second Republic has transformed our education from education 3.0 which was teaching research and community services and was producing job seekers to heritage based 5.0 that adds innovation and industrialisation meant to emancipate a group by giving them knowledge, skills and a framework for industrialisation and modernisation.
“Realising that an education that does not have its roots in the needs of the society that it intends to transform is not useful at all, we adopted the heritage-based philosophy to anchor our education 5.0. In terms of process, our education curriculum is now guided by the need to deliver goods and services that our people want, from the knowledge and innovations that come from our education,” he said.
Prof Murwira highlighted that education must be skewed in line with the country’s vision of achieving an upper middle-class economy by 2030.
“President Mnangagwa pronounced that our vision is to become an upper middle-economy or better by 2030. It is therefore important that we, in the higher and tertiary, innovation, science and technology development sectors, play our part to achieve this vision by providing the required and necessary national capabilities through a properly configured human capital development system.”
He said it was in that regard the Government was determined to use education to drive the country’s industrialisation and modernisation agenda.
Prof Murwira stressed the need for tertiary institutions to be in sync with the country’s developmental trajectory so that programmes were tailor-made to provide solutions to the national problems.
To that effect, he said the Government made a deliberate sound legal framework review to cause the heritage-based education 5.0 to industrialise and modernise the nation by amending the Manpower Planning and Development Act Chapter 28.02.
“The amended act puts innovation and industrialisation at the centre of higher and tertiary education delivery,” he said.
