Africa-Press – Eswatini. The Eswatini Higher Education Council (ESHEC) has engaged stakeholders in a workshop to discuss draft guidelines for the country’s education and skills development.
The event was held yesterday at Happy Valley hotel in Ezulwini. Officials from the Council of Higher Education Lesotho also attended.
ESHEC Executive Secretary Mbonisi Dlamini said in 2020 government approved the Eswatini Qualifications Framework (ESQF) as a policy instrument to facilitate development, classification, comparison and recognition of knowledge, skills and competencies.
He said the ESQF aimed to address inadequacies in the country’s education and skills development sector, including non-responsiveness of education and skills development to industry and labour market needs, fragmentation within the sector, poor credibility and quality of existing qualifications and training programmes.
“Following approval of the ESQF, guidelines on Credit Accumulation and Transfer (CAT) were developed and adopted in 2021; and already serve as a blueprint for the development and review of learning programmes using learning outcomes and credits,” Dlamini said.
He explained that to facilitate further implementation of the ESQF, draft guidelines on registration of qualifications on the ESQF had been developed along with qualification fields and sub-fields. The executive secretary said yesterday’s workshop was a platform where stakeholders were presented with the guidelines and also made inputs.
Dlamini said they were looking for programmes to be in line with industry needs and also be of international standards. “We are trying to modernise our qualifications to be in line with the rest of the world,” he said.
He added that the Eswatini National Skills Audit report, which was recently launched by Minister of Labour and Social Security Phila Buthelezi, complemented the frameworks. “The report is now making our work easier,” he said. In April, the minister presented to stakeholders the Eswatini National Skills Audit.
The report brought to the fore a number of challenges facing the labour market in the country. One of the challenges was that most skills supplied in the economy do not meet industry requirements on the level of qualifications held by employees, a lack of related work experience or relevance of programme to the job description.
One of the recommendations was that there is a need to leverage the Eswatini Higher Education Council to rationalise current programmes offered by tertiary institutions to align with current industry needs, more especially for micro-small medium enterprises (MSMEs).
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