Zim embarks on skills audit to address brain drain

The Zimbabwe government has embarked on a skills audit consultation process in an effort to address the mass exodus of skilled personnel from the country during the last two decades, said a cabinet minister.

Skills Audit and Development Minister, Paul Mavima, said this at a one-day stakeholders consultation workshop on the mandate of his Ministry held in the capital on Monday.

He said the vacuum that the capital flight created now needs to be addressed through a skills revolution that includes reversing the brain drain and focusing on contemporary skills needs.

Mavhima said the realisation that the country’s industrial sector was suffering from acute skills shortages despite the country having a huge population of educated people who are unemployed, especially the youths, had neccessitated the exercise.

He said the skills shortage points to the mismatch between what training institutions were producing and what industry required.

“It is against this background, that my Ministry was created to bridge these gaps and ensure that all training institutions are informed and capacitated to produce skilled professionals, who can meet the skills requirements for both the private and public sectors.

“Zimbabwe has one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. However, its skills level and adaptability is still very low. Adversely, this has undermined the developmental trajectory of our nation,” he said.

Zimbabwe, Mavhima explained, needs to adopt a deliberate strategy for a skills revolution to keep abreast with the fast-paced technologal world, adding that the world was in the age of the 4th Industrial Revolution which brings about huge demands for new skills.

The Ministry has since lined up several such workshops this week where stakeholders from various sectors will start the process of identifying sector specific skills needs and the gaps that must be filled both in terms of extant and emerging skills.

The consultations will form part of the country’s general skills audit as well as be the basis of the national skills development agenda going forward.

“Human Capital Development is the bedrock of economic growth and sustainable development. It is the ingenuity of a nation’s human capital that creates national value and national wealth. Nations that foster innovation can use their national resource base to their fullest advantage,” said Mavima.

In an interview with New Ziana on the side-lines of the workshop, permanent secretary in the Ministry, Rudo Chitiga, said it has been noted that there are some people with technical skills, who are good with their hands in solving problems, whilst others were academically gifted.

“We are saying we need now to create a pathway for those that are technically oriented so that at the end of it, they don’t get a ZIMSEC (Zimbabwe Schools Examinations Council) exam, but they get a HEXCO (Higher Education Examinations Council) exam so that they get trade tested and get their certificates, whereas the academically oriented go and continue with ZIMSEC and go up to “A” Level, go to university because we still need those as well,” she said.

She said gone were the days when the education system concentrated on the academic side alone, a system she said was sidelining 71 percent of the country’s school-going population. – New Ziana