The Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, on Tuesday, inaugurated TVET Service headquarters and the Applied Technology Institute in Accra.
The $131m projects comprise classroom blocks, ICT centres, administration blocks, workshops, male and female dormitories, and workshop equipment.
The Vice President also handed over 37 buses, 21 double cabin pickups, two tractors, three Toyota Fortuner and one Toyota V8 Landcruiser, and 26 Computers to the service.
Speaking at the commissioning and handing over ceremony at the TVET headquarters Vice President Bawumia said the facilities represent the biggest investment in TVET education in the history of the country, adding that the facilities and vehicles have come as a huge relief to all stakeholders in TVET.
“The overall expenditure for this project amounts to USD 131,657,198 and this has been one of the largest investments in the TVET landscape in Ghana,” said Dr Bawumia.
“The completion of this project has brought a sigh of relief to the management of Ghana TVET Service, the beneficiary institutions, students and the general public.”
The facilities add to the massive investments the government has made in promoting TVET education in the past five years, including the construction of the first phase of 32 state-of-the-Art TVET centres in all 16 regions of the country.
Dr Bawumia noted that “at the beginning of this administration in 2017, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had the vision to align all TVET institutions in the country, to provide appropriate governance and management structure for a unified national TVET system.”
Following this vision, Dr Bawumia said, the government realigned the TVET landscape to provide coordination of the curriculum, training of trainers/facilitators, linkage with industry, entry requirement, training facilities, mode of delivery, assessment, certification system and employability of graduates, by synchronising all existing laws relating to skills training in the country.
“In pursuit of this noble objective, I, on behalf of the President launched the Ghana TVET Service last year at a colourful event at the Accra Technical Training Centre. I am proud to see the many noticeable successes chalked by the management of the Ghana TVET Service, one of which we are here to witness today,” the Vice President said.
Reiterating the government’s commitment to investing more in TVET education, Dr Bawumia added that TVET is important to the government’s industrialisation drive and its effort to reduce growing youth unemployment.
“The government of President Akufo-Addo has been on this progressively steady path of bringing technical and vocational education to the front burner of our educational strata because the provision of technical and vocational education and training is the panacea to mounting unemployment among the teeming Ghanaian youth.”
“It is against this background that we need to have balanced skills demand and supply in our educational system, especially in our part of the globe. To give credence to our commitment, the government signed a contract with Planet One Group – for the upgrading and modernization of the vocational education system in Ghana.”
“Several other initiatives have been taken by the government in giving greater emphasis and impetus to the TVET education system in Ghana, including the establishment of a TVET commission.”
“All in all, these efforts and initiatives have yielded some remarkable results unparalleled in the history of this country,” he said.
Dr Bawumia named other interventions the government has made in the TVET sector in the past six years as the upgrading and modernisation of all the erstwhile 34 National Vocational and Technical Institutes (NVTI), upgrading and modernisation of Head Offices together with 10 Regional Offices, upgrading and modernisation of 5 apprenticeship offices across the country.
It also includes the upgrading and modernisation of the Opportunity Industrialisation Center in Accra, comprising the construction, rehabilitation and equipping of laboratories, workshops, additional classrooms, hostels, administrative blocks, two (2) new foundries and machining centres – one in CSIR (Accra) and the other at KNUST, Kumasi.
In addition, the Vice President disclosed that new workshops (computer, electrical, electronic, building construction, mechanical); rehabilitation of buildings in two Technical institutes (Abetifi and Don Bosco) and four Senior High Technical Schools (Kyebi SHTS, Dagbon State SHTS, St. Georges SHTS and GSTS), ongoing construction of five new District TVET centres of excellence at Anyinam and Pakyi No. 2 (near completion) while that of AssinJakai in Central Region, Akomadan and MansoAbore in Ashanti Region will start soon.
The government, Dr Bawumia said, has also completed and inaugurated the rehabilitation of 10 Technical Universities and 13 Technical Institutes, which includes the construction of new workshops/laboratories and supply and installation of equipment fit for disciplines in electrical and electronics engineering, welding technology, automotive maintenance, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering.
Rex Mainoo Yeboah, ISD
