Stakeholders in vocational and technical education in Calabar have stressed the need to improve the standard of vocational and technical education in Nigeria to train employable people.

They made the call in an interview with newsmen at the end of a workshop on qualitative education for employment and enhancement of quality of teaching and learning in Nigeria’s educational institutions

The national workshop on “Education for Employment (E4E)’’ was organised in conjunction with the Federal Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labour, the African Development Fund (ADF) and the Kiara College, UK.

Dr Ebele Nwofor, the project manager of ADF-sponsored projects on Skills Training and Vocational Education, said it was important that products from our technical institutions should improve.

“We are conducting this workshop because we realised that there is a mismatch between the requirement of the industry and the skills that are produced in these technical institutions.

“Since everybody has realised that technical and vocational education are cardinal to development, we decided to conduct this workshop to build the capacity of our teachers, instructors and staff of these institutions.

“Right now the project is conducting a labour market studies to build the labour market information system to close the gap between educational institutions and the industry.

“We say there is no job but the youths that are available are not employable because they do not have the skills required for the industry,’’ she said.

Nwofor said because of increased awareness on the need for vocational and technical education by the ADF project, there had been increased enrolments in vocational and technical institutions nationwide.

One of the facilitators at the workshop, Dr Endi ‘Ndubuisi’ Ezengwa, the Chief Executive Officer, Kiara College, also told newsmen that the organisation was interested in technical and vocational qualifications in Nigeria.

“The workshop was established to bridge the gap between educational institutions in Africa and the industry and employers.

“We have travelled to Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia because we felt that it will be good to bring what we have learned to Africa.

“We researched on the need for vocational and technical qualifications and one of the things we found out is that we still are stuck on the colonial mentality of having degrees.

“To have vocational qualifications does not mean that you are inferior or less intelligent; it means that you are meeting a need in the community.

“ It is important that the community begins to appreciate people who have got skills and vocational qualifications.

“We need to have more industries because the case of production will be cheaper and people will stop importing and start to produce,’’ Ezengwa observed.