On the 27th of April 2017 BTC Uganda, together with the Belgian Embassy, organized a South –south skills development conference in Kampala on “private sector-led change towards sustainable financing & coordination of skills development”. Ugandan Minister of Education and First Lady, Janet Museveni, participated in the discussions.  

Training the hand
The event gathered specialists in skills development from Uganda and the wider region, with representatives from Ghana, Namibia and Rwanda. Members of the Ugandan business community also shared their ideas on skills development, emphasizing that the reinforcement of technical and vocational training is a necessary condition for the socio-economic development of Uganda. First lady and Minister of Education Janet Museveni added: “In Uganda we used to train the head and the heart. But we didn’t include the hand, so we have an incomplete training cycle in our nation. A lot of people think to use your hand is a shame but we are changing this.”  

BTC is implementing the Support to Skilling Uganda program in joint partnership with the Ministry of Education and Sports. The aim is to implement the Skilling Uganda reform agenda at national and grass root levels by making Ugandans’ skills more responsive to the employer’s needs. In the words of Dirck Teerlinck, Belgian head of bilateral cooperation: “The private sector should be directly involved with TVET, they can only offer jobs if the people match their needs and technical profiles.”  

The private sector as a motor for change
Within this context and in close collaboration with the Education Development Partners, the discussion focused on private sector-led change in skills development. In presence of a set of international guests from Ghana, Namibia and Rwanda, invitees discussed the way forward on 3 thematic areas:
-Alternative financing for Skills Development
-Work Based learning & apprentices
-How to ensure quality standards in Skilling Uganda efforts.  

Knowledge and experience of advanced countries in the region were shared through bench-marking of their successful skills development systems. For example, Albert Nsengiyumva, Skills Development Expert from Rwanda stated that “Public-private dialogue must be held on a regular basis. That is why every year in Rwanda we organise a TVET –expo: the training schools showcase their capabilities and the private sector is there to see what the schools and government can offer.”  

In short, the south-to-south conference identified new areas for building synergies on private sector integration in skills development through sharing of innovative ideas that can be replicated for the realization of the Skilling Uganda Reform Agenda.