The National Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training was inaugurated today. This group comprising private sector representatives, NGO leaders, and social partners will be in charge of steering government's vocational training program. It may sound like just another talk shop where much is said but nothing happens. Well that's not the case this time; this group is determined to make things happen at three new Centers for Employment Training in Orange Walk, Corozal and Stann Creek.
Those centers are under construction and will open in August. Minister of Education Francis Fonseca who gave the council his blessing today says that faced with the options to lead, follow or get out of the way, GOB has stepped aside on this one and is leaving the lead to the private sector.
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"We made a conscious effort to move away from establishing a bureaucracy out of the Ministry of Education. What we want is people coming from the society who work on a daily basis and deal with these issues and challenges everyday in their own workplace. This whole initiative has to be private sector driven, in a way, and the Ministry of Education has to provide support to that effort and direction to that effort. So yes we wanted to bring in labor, we wanted to bring in the private sector, civil society; that's the only way it will succeed and so that is why the composition of the board reflects that understanding.
These people who come from the private sector know best what their needs are. The whole philosophy behind the TVET initiative, the project, is aimed at filling that gap, providing those opportunities for these young people to gain employable skills that we believe they need. I hear it all the time from business men, 'listen I don't need somebody with all sorts of qualifications, I need somebody who specifically has this skill that I need in my industry to provide a service to my customers.' So that is the objective behind the whole program.
We're investing a lot in workshops. A criticism, and I believe a legitimate criticism, of the CET over the years is that there has been too much focus on theory. The young people going into the CET, for example here on St. Thomas St., they are there and they have limited access to workshops but they get a lot of theoretical training. We've invested through this project quite a bit in workshops and machinery which allow these young people to get the hands on skill training we believe they need to be technicians and to be master builders."
And while the opening of the three centers in August is the good news, the bad news is that due to cuts in capital three spending and a downsizing of the entire project, the $6 million CET planned for the southside of Belize City was a casualty of spending cuts. When the economic situation improves, government hopes to bring it back on stream.
