The African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) will host researchers and government officials from six sub-Saharan African countries – Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia, Niger, Rwanda and Uganda – at an inception meeting for its study on ‘Strengthening Education and Learning Systems to Deliver a 4IR-Ready Workforce’ on October 2 and 3.
The two-day inception meeting, to be held in Accra, will bring together researchers, experts and other key stakeholders to discuss the inception report and agree on key aspects of the study, including the study objectives, analytical framework, methodology and key deliverables of the project in order to ensure that ACET’s trademark high-quality work is maintained across all the study countries.
The study, which is under ACET’s Youth, Employment and Skills (YES) programme, is set against the background of a growing youth population in Africa with countries facing significant challenges in realising the demographic dividend.
The rapid advancement of the fourth industrial revolution is also fundamentally disrupting manufacturing technology with implications for the nature and growth of jobs, slow economic transformation across Africa is hampering growth in productive jobs and low educational attainment as well as poor overall quality of education persists.
Its overarching objective is to examine how education and training systems in selected African countries are adjusting to meet the evolving labour demand in light of the rapidly evolving digital technologies and the changing nature of work by examining the youth employment and skills challenges and opportunities in the six African countries.
The study will review in-depth, the structure and composition (demographic, education and skills) of the workforce. It will review policies, regulations and institutional arrangements aimed at boosting employment opportunities for youth and ways to implement innovative education and training initiatives, with a focus on the impact of digital technologies on job creation, and explore the nature of skills needed to create jobs and grow the economy.
