A two-day British Council I-WORK National Workshop was organised in Ghana on 23 - 24 January 2020. The aim of the workshop was to highlight the work done in developing the ‘Draft National Apprenticeship Policy’ for Ghana and to share good practice learned through international partnerships with some selected commonwealth countries.
Our objective
To improve work opportunities for young people including those from disadvantaged backgrounds within the commonwealth by piloting and introducing new approaches to employer led skills development.
Our strategy and impact
Upon assessing Ghana’s apprenticeship system through I-WORK’s unique benchmarking tool, it became clear that an apprenticeship policy is needed if Ghana is going to move forward and become globally competitive within the TVET ecosystem. British Council, in collaboration with the Council for Technical and Vocational Education Training (COTVET), has developed a ‘Draft national Apprenticeship Policy’ to bring harmony in the way apprenticeship is practiced in the country. There are currently about nine different ministries within Ghana managing apprenticeship their own way. Once approved and operationalised, the draft policy will sanitise and harmonise all activities within the ministries and bring about positive change.
To fortify our TVET training institutions, six training providers from Ghana joined partnership clusters with training providers from Malaysia, India, South Africa and the UK to work on projects which promote mutual learning and good practices amongst commonwealth member states. Both leaders and practitioners from all six TVET training providers had the opportunity of travelling outside Ghana to see, share and most importantly learn from other training providers.
As result of intensive collaboration and innovation by the I-WORK team, there is now in place a ‘Draft National Apprenticeship Policy’ which is already going through approval processes to becoming a working document. Almost 400 people attended a two-day National Workshop on this project. This demonstrates how important this policy and fostered partnerships are to Ghanaians. Through the partnerships, some of our training providers have already acquired industrial machines, acres of land etc. to improve teaching and learning within their schools with others forming Advisory Boards to create new and improve upon existing systems and links to employers.
“The existence of a National Apprenticeship Policy is long overdue and now especially is the time to ensure we have one to move TVET forward in our country” – Gifty Ampofo Twum, Deputy Minister of Education, TVET
“For any country to develop, more than 50% of their young force should be in TVET” – Fred Kyei Asamoah, Executive Director - COTVET