The Sunday News
Leonard Ncube, Victoria Falls Reporter
AFRICAN governments should come up with educational systems that promote skills development and innovation as the era of priding themselves in literacy that does not provide answers to national challenges is long gone by, a Cabinet Minister has said.
Officially opening the Association of Technical Universities and Polytechnics in Africa (ATUPA) international conference in Victoria Falls last week, Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Professor Amon Murwira said other countries have something to learn from Zimbabwe’s Second Republic which transformed its education system to focus on skills development.
He said after adopting the Education 5.0 model, Zimbabwe managed to invest in the development of industrial skills through setting up of innovation hubs at institutions of higher learning that have given rise to new start-ups that Government was supporting.
Training colleges were also furthering the cause through embarking on huge infrastructure projects. He said after the outbreak of Covid-19, institutions of higher learning started producing personal protective equipment such as sanitisers, masks and oxygen thereby boosting industry.
Prof Murwira said countries that have well developed education systems that emphasise on knowledge and skills fared better during Covid-19 pandemic era as they produced their own PPEs and vaccines, and Zimbabwe also did well by producing its own PPEs.
“President Mnangagwa pronounced a bold vision that Zimbabwe should become an upper-middle-income economy by 2030 and the vision will be achieved through knowledge and innovation. We then embarked on an exercise to make an education that develops knowledge and skills that enable this nation to have the capabilities to produce goods and services that it requires. Coincidentally this need for a well configured education system became apparent with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic which brought a new reality in the world which needed a robust response from the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) education ecosystem,” said Prof Murwira.
He said Government used the TVET ecosystem to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, supported by Innovation Hubs and industrial parks at the University of Zimbabwe, National University of Science and Technology, Midlands State University, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Great Zimbabwe University and Harare Institute of Technology.
Prof Murwira said a national skills audit in 2017 showed that while Zimbabwe literacy rate was over 90 percent, average skills availability stood at 38 percent hence the need for reconfiguring the education system.
“Zimbabwean education was designed to produce an employment seeker as it emphasized more on literacy championed through a three mission education system (Education 3.0) and we were then able to pin down the cause of our low levels of industrialisation as being attributed to low skill levels.
“The low skills levels were further analysed to be a function of the design of our education system in relation to the balance between knowledge and skills, which we inherited from the colonial government.
In 2018 the Second Republic undertook an exercise to redesign our education specifically as this has not changed since the advent of our independence,” said Prof Murwira.
The theme of the conference was: “Repositioning Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Education, Ecosystem in light of Covid-19 through heritage based education” which Prof Murwira said challenges Africa to rethink the TVET education design.
He said teaching and learning must therefore focus on local environment and locally available materials, which is what inspired the Education 5.0 in 2018.
Prof Murwira said Covid-19 was the turning point in Zimbabwe’s education as it opened minds on the importance of TVET heritage based education. The conference ended on Friday and was attended by academics and students from across Africa. -@ncubeleon
