Vocational training colleges urged to introduce entrepreneurship courses

Dr Shukuru Kawambwa, minister for Education and Vocational training

Entrepreneurship skills are to be incorporated in vocational training colleges’ curriculums if they are to produce students able to engage in self-employment and become job creators rather than seekers.

“It is high time for colleges to ensure that students are empowered with entrepreneurship skills, so that they become job creators and not job seekers,” minister for Education and Vocational training, Dr Shukuru Kawambwa said over the weekend. He was speaking in Arusha at the first graduation of 36 diploma students who pursued hotel management studies at the VETA Hotel and Tourism Training Institute (VHTTI), East Africa's third biggest public institution for hospitality and tourism training, after Kenya's Utalii College (KUC) in Nairobi.
“As government, we need to produce competitive graduates who can ably establish their own enterprises soon after colleges,” the minister emphasised.
He said students should be trained entrepreneurship with focus been placed more on practical hands on training than in class theories.
“Unemployment has been and still a very serious problem, and a key way to address it, is introducing in our vocational training curriculums, entrepreneurship programmes that will equip the trainees with basic business knowhow,” Dr. Kawambwa said.
The minister also encouraged students pursuing studies in the hotel and hospitality industry to seek jobs outside the country citing the fact that Tanzania and the rest of the EAC has been working on implementing the EAC Common Market Protocol, which came into effective in July 2010 allowing for cross border labour migration.
“That’s why there are Kenyans, Ugandans, and Rwandans who work in Tanzania, so, even our people are allowed to go and work in those countries,” he told the graduates. 

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN