FG Returns To Vocational, Technical Education, Promises To Pay Trainees
From Abdul SULE, ABUJA
Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, has disclosed that the federal government plans to pay Nigerians who will enrol in technical and vocational schools.
The education minister, Speaking on Politics Today, a programme on Channels Television, recently, Alausa said this is part of reforms going on in the sector aimed at addressing Nigeria’s human capacity gaps with vocational skills to stimulate economic growth.
In Nigeria, vocational schools train students in practical skills for direct employment, entrepreneurship, or further technical education.
These institutions offer certificates in vocations like carpentry, welding, electrical installation, plumbing, ICT, fashion design, and more.
Regulated by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), the institutions typically enrol junior or senior secondary school leavers.
Alausa said this is part of a four-step plan to boost enrolment in vocational schools, including monetary incentives for students and structural reforms to guarantee positive learning outcomes.
He said the government will pay students to attend the schools, fund those schools through dissertation fees, and implement hands-on training where master craftspersons from various industries will mentor trainees, with monthly payments for each student.
The minister said a nationwide monitoring system would ensure quality training while the ministry would provide entrepreneurial grants to trainees at the end of their programme.
“In the UK or the US today, a plumber earns more than a doctor,” the minister said, pushing for a movement to reverse the well-reported mass emigration of Nigeria’s skilled workers to countries in the global north for better living conditions.
“We want to now bring this pool of workers back. So what we’re doing with technical and vocational education is that we’ve laid out a four-step approach here.
“We would pay students to go to those schools. We’ve modelled how much we’re going to pay them when we roll the programme out. We’ll be announcing that.
“What we will be doing with technical education will be 20% didactic and 80% hands-on training. We’re pre-qualifying the master craft persons from large industries to medium-sized industries and small industries.
“We’ll ask you how many students can you train, 10 students? We’ll give you 10 students and we’ll pay for each. We’ll pay you for each of those students every month, students every month. We will go and come back to see that those students are being taught properly.
“We’ll recruit 774 performance monitor officers for each local government that will go around to ensure those students are getting the right practical training.”
Alausa said the education ministry has designed a framework categorising vocational education into skill training centres, vocational enterprise institutes, and state/federal technical colleges.
“For the skill training centre, it will be six-month training and that will be open to people that drop out from school, people that didn’t finish primary school, and people that didn’t complete their JSS,” he said.
“You’ll have six months of training there and we’ve been very careful and deliberate in the kind of skills we will be training at these schools. We’ve done a labour gap analysis to see what skills are needed. We’re also incorporating new emerging skill set.”
The minister said President Bola Tinubu has directed him to work with the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Bank of Industry to facilitate single-digit credits for trainees.
He added that Nigeria’s educational system is transitioning from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy.
