The Status of TVET in the SADC Region Report
“Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is an important tool of public policy. It can support economic growth and poverty alleviation; facilitate the transition of young people to decent work and adulthood; improve the productivity of existing workers and allow for the reinsertion of the unemployed into work; assist in reconstruction after conflicts and disasters; and promote social inclusion. The value of TVET is clearly recognised in SADC’s work, which is governed by the SADC Protocol on Education and Training (1997), and by UNESCO, which sees TVET as one of its three priority areas in its work on meeting the Education for All (EFA) goals.
However, despite the importance of TVET for development and a range of national reform initiatives to support TVET over the past two decades, major concerns remain regarding the state of TVET in the Southern African region. These led SADC and UNESCO to intervene through the commissioning of a pilot TVET monitoring tool and a regional review of the state of TVET, with a view to developing a new strategic programme of action for regional cooperation in TVET. As is made clear throughout this report, the evidence-gathering process for these activities demonstrated the very weak current knowledge base for TVET in the region. This means that the report has to be seen as a first step towards better knowledge for better policies and practices. The limitations of the data mean that the findings are often the best currently possible rather than meeting the highest standards of rigour.
Equally, the comparative analysis cannot be as sophisticated as may be possible in future years when the data are more robust. Nonetheless, the report represents an important step forward in building an evidence-driven picture of the state of TVET in Southern Africa that provides a valuable basis for future strategic interventions. A key challenge for this work is that there is no definitional agreement regarding the nature and scope of TVET in the region. Indeed, TVET is the term used in this report as this was agreed by SADC and UNESCO and does reflect (some of) the language of some countries.
However, TVET could be replaced by other concepts such as human resources development or skills development, which are seen in some contexts as being broader notions. It is apparent that there is a pressing need for a better inter-regional understanding of what particular terms mean, even if countries are to continue with their own preferences. It may also be important to develop a glossary of what is meant by certain terms (e.g., life skills, subject knowledge, and technical skills); a taxonomy of how these relate to each other theoretically; and a theory of how their acquisition/development should be sequenced and structured. Such a discussion would also need to clarify what should be included under the rubric of TVET (or any other preferred term). It is necessary, for instance, to decide whether technical/commercial schooling; the provision of occasional vocational subjects in an otherwise academic education; and/or the infusion of a whole schooling with vocationally-oriented notions such as life or employability skills merit consideration as part of a broader skills or TVET strategy.
Equally, it is necessary to consider what elements of higher education are also properly parts of TVET: for instance, non-advanced provision in TVET institutions; provision in specialist advanced technical, vocational or professional institutions; the provision of vocational subjects in universities (and whether these include subjects such as law and medicine); and/or the infusing of all university programmes with employability skills. These numerous definitions and tensions, and the way that they are reflected in the available data, have required the use in this regional report of a pragmatic definition of TVET that largely focuses on initial vocational education and training within dedicated provider institutions that engage with the lower and intermediate levels of national qualifications, and, to a lesser extent, on the provision of formal qualifications either totally in workplaces or in some form of alternance system of work and training.”
Status of tvet in the sadc region