About 96,000 diploma students from 93 polytechnic institutions have received stipends under the Skills and Training Enhancement Project (STEP) in the country.
The World Bank (WB) and Canada are jointly funding the $99 million skill development project where the WB contribution is $79 million and Canada $20 million.
A media release by the WB Thursday said, of the 93 benefited polytechnic institutes, 43 are public and 50 private institutions. Of the total beneficiaries, 15 per cent students are female.
The STEP has been working since 2010 to strengthen public and private polytechnic institutes to improve quality of skill training and align curriculum with market needs.
Under the skill development project, all the selected polytechnic institutions have brought changes in their management committees by including industry representatives in their decision-making process.
The government has recruited 500 contractual teachers for 25 public polytechnic institutes and another 500 contractual teachers will soon be hired to enhance the quality of technical education.
About 1,200 teachers have been trained to provide more relevant training to students and teachers.
The project is also assisting 30 polytechnic institutes to implement their development plans and is supporting 50 short-course training providers.
These short-course providers have already trained 40,000 in 38 technologies and 34 per cent of their graduates got jobs within six months of training completion.
One-fourth of the trainees are women.
The pass rate in the supported polytechnic institutes has reached 64 per cent and in short-courses 96 per cent as quality of education and public examination has been improving.
Through the project, recognition of prior learning (RPL), which aims to assess the skill levels of existing workforce in the informal economy and certify their skills, will be launched for the first time in the country.
The project also undertook massive awareness programme to popularise technical vocational education and training (TVET), which has increased enrolment by three folds, and other innovative approaches to make the TVET more relevant and market-oriented.
