29 Jul 2020

The Chief Executive Officer for Human Resource Development Council (HRDC), Dr Raphael Dingalo has emphasised the importance of the linkage between institutions and industry for institutions to produce that which industry wants.

Speaking in an interview with BOPA recently about the National Human Resource Development Plan (NHRDP), Dr Dingalo said the plan was meant to assist the government in setting up the human capital agenda.

He said the human capital pipeline runs from supply to demand with the supply side focused on institutions and the industries on the demand side.

He highlighted that recommendations that the plan touched on included the adoption of ICT; Entrepreneurship Development; Science and Technology; Engineering and Mathematics at universities.

“Those are the critical areas that you need now more than ever before and we believe that in terms of pushing through and implementation, all critical key stakeholders would see the need to implement the plan,” Dr Dingalo said.

He revealed that HRDC was not necessarily the implementers of the NHRDP; citing that there were a number of stakeholders from primary to secondary schools, tertiary and the industry.

He reiterated that both the public and private sector had a critical role to play in the implementation of the plan. Dr Dingalo said organisations such as Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) and Citizen Empowerment Development Agency (CEDA) needed to come up with programmes to assist the country with job creation.

He said the expectation was for entrepreneurship development to take precedence and for universities to come up with push-through projects that would be able to help graduates to create jobs for themselves and others; not only to seek employment.

“NHRDP emphasises the need to strengthen institution-industry relationships because when you are talking about transformation from a resource to a knowledge-based economy, essentially there should be a very close link between institutions and industry,” he said.

Dr Dingalo said that ideally, institutions should carry out research that would inform products that are out there in the industry. He said when institutions come up with projects, the expectation was that they would now be taken up by the industry and developed into market ready products.

Furthermore, he stated that research played a fundamental role because the strategy of the country was that it should be export led, which meant there should be rapid development of products and services that coud be sold outside.

Dr Dingalo said for the country to achieve this, there was need for the relationship between industry and institutions to strengthen the research.

With challenges eminent from this development, he said, there was need to harness this relationship. He revealed that HRDC was currently developing an apprenticeship and internship policy framework that would guide the relations between institutions and industry going forward.

Under the apprenticeship and internship policy framework, all institutions; both public and private; would be treated in equal measure and attachments would apply to all, Dr Dingalo said.

He underlined that the NHRDP is a 10-year blueprint, which has some activities already in the pipeline. ENDS