National Instructors College Abilonino is a one of the vocational training institutions in Uganda located in the northern part of Uganda.Among the many vocational trainings offered at the college is a course in tailoring and garment design.

The tailoring and garment department however was faced with several challenges that hindered smooth transfer of learning to the students.

The workshop lay out was poor, they had no knowledge on decorative designing and yet they had the equipment, identifying fabrics and material types was a challenge, resource mobilization from products of the class was no existent but rather a pile of product was kept in the class to gather dust.

That was until the Support to the Development of Human resources project facilitated a needs assessment exercise at the facility aimed at identifying the key skills gaps that then the project would support to bridge.

These gaps and many others in various departments stood out and thus a training was then tailored and administrated to the staff of the tailoring and garments department.The situation has since been turned around in this department.
A walk into the tailoring room and you see a symmetrical layout of the workshop. Machines of the same kind are placed in one space to ensure smooth transition from one stage of production to the other.“Each group working on a particular phase of a product are in one space,” Teddy Kitibwa, a senior lecturer in the department mentions.“We have also sold all our products. We use to have piles and piles of products and we didn’t know what to do with them. Now almost everything is gone.” Teddy adds.“You can imagine, we had equipment for graphic designing but we didn’t know how to use them. Thanks to the training, we now have the knowledge and we are now even teaching our students graphic designing on fabrics,” teddy says
“We also now can easily identify which fabric is what, what fabric is suitable for what. This has greatly helped us make standard products that can be bought.” She adds.The resources collected from sales are being used to purchase more equipment, and support students in the class who may need any financial support. 

This motivates the students knowing in case of any problem, there is an emergency fund that can support them to complete their course.“We are really greatful for this training. The trainer was very knowledgeable and has helped us a lot to structure our department better. If only she would come again.” Teddy concludes