MISALE, ETHIOPIA

Unemployment is a persistent problem in Ethiopia, especially among youth. Most of the workforce, around 35 million people, have very low levels of educational attainment and are engaged in low skilled work. Technical vocational education and training (TVET) programmes, established to improve the quality of human resources in the country, are often of low quality and theory-driven due to resource constraints and a lack of skilled technical teachers. These educational establishments are also ill-prepared to adjust to changing labour market demands and cannot keep pace with the rapidly increasing demand for trained manpower in sectors such as commercial vehicle driving.

Volvo, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and UNIDO have partnered to establish the first vocational training school for the training of trainers and commercial vehicle drivers (CVDs) in Ethiopia to meet the growing demand from private transport companies. The vocational training school will train 40 trainees and 20 trainers each year, in addition to 480 employees from other transport companies who will benefit from short-term skill upgrading training on an annual basis.

The project strives to introduce mandatory road safety training, such as defensive driving and awareness campaigns in schools in order to reduce the fatality rates from 65 to 32 in five years’ time according to the target of the government. Furthermore, and in collaboration with the Ethiopian Federal Transport Authority, the project will establish standards for the teachers and students certification and assist other schools to adopt a new curriculum for CVD training based on the success of this new institute.