Zimbabwe says education is now producing jobs

Zimbabwe is fine tuning its education so that it can produce jobs and employable graduates, Higher Education Minister Amon Murwira told Parliament yesterday.

He said right now Zimbabwe had a literacy rate of 94 percent, one of the highest on the continent, but the skills level was only at 38 percent.

“We studied our education system and how it was churning out graduates who were unemployed or unemployable.  We then said; no, education has three terms of reference, which was teaching, research and workshops, which we call community engagement,” Murwira said.

“Now, what we have done with our education system is to convert it from this 3.0 education system to 5.0 education system.  What do we mean?  We added in our qualifications framework; innovation and industrialisation and our bodies of skill and knowledge are going to make sure that we are going to have a new breed of graduates and approach to education that will lead to the industrialisation and modernisation of this country.

“We are always saying, jobs do not fall from the sky, they come from education, so we are making our education be able to create jobs.  If you go to Microsoft, you will discover that all these people are doing jobs from education.

“At this moment, we are creating industrial parks, universities are producing industrial parks.  On Monday this week, we released $3 million to Chinhoyi University of Technology to expand its industrial park which we developed last year and have an annual output revenue of US$140 million from artificial insemination.

“This is evidence that is on the ground and I actually encourage the Hon. Member to go to Chinhoyi. I can actually facilitate the transport to see what we are doing to create jobs from knowledge, not from imagination.

“At the same time, on Monday, we released US$3 million to the University of Zimbabwe to start an industrial parking in the University of Zimbabwe farm. That is job creation,” the minister said.

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