From October 1 to 5, 2024, four higher learning institutions from Rwanda are participating in the final Conference and Summer School 2024 of the African Centre for Career Enhancement & Skills Support (ACCESS) in Hammamet, Tunisia.
The conference, themed “Graduate unemployment in Africa: Towards a Paradigm Shift,” aims to address pressing issues related to graduate employment on the continent.
Rwanda is represented by Institut Catholique de Kabgayi (ICK), INES Ruhengeri, Rwanda Polytechnic (Musanze College and Ngoma College).
In his opening speech, Pro. Dr. Utz Dornberger, from University of Leipzig, emphasized the importance of the conference, “As we gather experts from six different countries, this conference serves as a platform for exchanging ideas and strategies that will shape the future of employment for African graduate.”
“I am confident that our discussions will yield valuable insights and foster innovative solutions and I look to the future with the optimism and anticipate the continuation of our work in the proposed ACCESS 2.0 phase hopefully starting in 2025.” He added.
The conference is focusing on the need to revisit economic and other theoretical foundations, in order to update the link between improving the levels of education, particularly university education, of a country’s human resources, economic growth and development, in African countries.
The problems associated with university training in African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), the inadequacy of course selection, and the quality of higher education, all of which contribute to massive graduate unemployment are also being analyzed in the conference.
During the conference, panel discussions and presentation of papers that examine issues and approaches to revisiting and contextualizing the concept of employability in Africa are being used.
While the summer school component is focusing on capacity building for lecturers, doctoral students and university staff around the same theme and the specific topics including the impact of education on economic growth, the paradigm shifts in African higher education systems: from massification of university systems to quality training, entrepreneurship and graduate unemployment, graduate unemployment and regional issues in African countries among others.
The consortium also seeks to increase opportunities for African students in the global job market by connecting them with companies that can tap into their expertise. Building on existing collaborations between the University of Leipzig and its African partner universities, ACCESS aims to create a practice-oriented platform for African higher education institutions (HEIs), development cooperation partners, business associations and agencies in the South.
The ACCESS conference and summer school is a great opportunity to share the program’s research findings with African university ecosystems and, above all, with institutional decision-makers and business leaders, for a better understanding of the issues and challenges facing labor markets in Africa.
ACCESS is a consortium of six African universities from Rwanda, Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tunisia, working with the University of Leipzig, Germany, to study the stagnation of the labor market in Africa despite the increasing level of formal education of the employed and salaried population.
