Skills Development
Youth unemployment is a global challenge. Forty-five percent of the world’s young people without work, many of them young women, live in the Asia and Pacific regions. In Africa, the challenge is to find productive employment for 7 to 10 million new entrants to the labour market every year. In Kenya and Tanzania, for example, the annual number of young people joining the labour forces is respectively 500,000 and 700,000. Eighty percent of jobs worldwide require technical and vocational skills, yet skills training is 14 times more expensive than general secondary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Fiji, only 0.36% of the education budget is devoted to technical and vocational education and training.
The challenge is to provide cost-effective and flexible learning opportunities to large numbers of people. Successful ODL models can be replicated and shared in other jurisdictions.
COL advocates the development of national and institutional policy for the use of ODL in order to scale up opportunities for skills development.
In 2009-2010, COL will:
- work with institutional partners to design and deliver quality ODL courses and foster greater use of ICTs in such courseware;
- make materials available as open educational resources to be shared and adapted around the Commonwealth;
- create needs-based ODL training materials for skills development to enhance the livelihoods of communities;
- provide training in course writing, tutoring and learner support; and
- foster partnerships between Commonwealth institutions at different stages of development with a focus on south-south co-operation.