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The Vocational Education and Training Agency in Tanzania

Written by: International Labour Organization

Article Overview: Since the early 1970s, the government of Tanzania, with very considerable donor support, has developed a national network of 18 vocational training centres catering mainly for the traditional artisan trades.

The Vocational Education and Training Agency in Tanzania

Since the early 1970s, the government of Tanzania, with very considerable donor support, has developed a national network of 18 vocational training centres catering mainly for the traditional artisan trades. However, from the late 1980s onwards, public funding of these centres declined dramatically in real terms and the government came under increasing pressure from the major donors which had supported VET, to reform comprehensively the system. The outcome of these deliberations was the 1994 Vocational Education and Training Act whose overall objective is to provide "a legal framework for the implementation of a flexible VET system capable of responding quickly to the needs of the labour market" (VETA, 1996, p.1). The three key features of this new framework are: the creation of VETA as an autonomous government agency with its own Board; the introduction of a training levy of two percent of gross payroll for all enterprise with four or more employees; and decentralisation with the establishment of regional VET boards.

While VETA appears to have many of the key features needed for an effective demand-driven training system, there are a number of problems with the design of VETA which are likely to undermine its overall effectiveness. First and most serious, VETA continues to provide much the same type of artisan training in the core manual trades as before. Except for a small and declining group of mainly manufacturing enterprises, this is not the type of training that is needed by the large majority of enterprises in both industrial and non-industrial sectors. As elsewhere, enterprise demand for workforce training is of two main types: (i) technical and managerial skills that are largely sector-specific e.g. mining, horticulture, tourism; and (ii) general, mainly short term training in core areas of competence that are needed in all sectors (in particular, accountancy, marketing, personnel management, computing, and a wide range of secretarial skills).

Given the continued narrow training mandate of VETA, it is unlikely that the new training levy will "enhance participation and accountability" as is intended. Since over 90 percent of training levy income is to be allocated to VETA's own training centres until at least 2000, hardly any new funding will be available that could be used to support other kinds of training. Faced with this situation, most enterprises will regard the training levy as just another tax that, moreover, is to be used to support a set of training institutions that have little or no relevance to their training needs. It is not surprising to find therefore that in 1996 only 23 percent of the 12,000 liable enterprises were actually paying the training levy.

Another problem area in the design of VETA is the absence of any clear separation between VETA's roles as regulator and financer, on the one hand, and those of support services and actual training provider, on the other. Without such a separation, it is likely that in allocating levy resources, VETA will give preference to its own training centres rather than allocating these resources to all training institutions in accordance with actual training needs and the capacity of these VET institutions to deliver cost-effective training. Thus, as far as most private sector training centres are concerned, the VETA Act simple perpetuates what has become a very uneven playing field that favours a particular public sector training provider.

EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING
PAPERS
43
Learning to change: Skills
development among the
economically vulnerable and
socially excluded in
developing countries
Paul Bennell
Employment and Training Department
International Labour Office Geneva
First published 1999

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Article Tags: autonomous government, core areas, decentralisation, deliberations, donor support, government of tanzania, gross payroll, industrial sectors, labour market, legal framework, management computing, managerial skills, manual trades, manufacturing enterprises, personnel management, secretarial skills, vet system, vocational education and training, vocational training, workforce training



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