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  • Evidence of Tajikistan training intentions

    In the popular television series ‘The Apprentice’ – where aspiring young professionals compete for a dream job with a self-made millionaire and entrepreneur – it is the best briefed, most thoroughly prepared who make it through to the finals.

  • Winning generally involves having a particular gift – ruthless guile is useful – but it is really the legwork involved in

    “In the vocational education game of life, evidence based policy is the recipe for winning”

  • building the proper foundations that enables winners to scale the heights.

    In the vocational education game of life, evidence-based policy is the recipe for winning.

    In Tajikistan, one of the poorest of the Central Asian states, creating an environment in which officials and politicians can gather and use reliable data on the labour market, vocational education system and students to create realistic, effective policies, is a key objective.

  • The ETF is working with politicians and policy advisors to create such evidence-based foundations to ensure that a better system of post school and adult training can be built on top.

    In June, the ETF brought key Tajikistan education, labour, migration, social protection, statistics and adult training specialists together for a one-day workshop in Dushanbe on evidence based policy development in vocational education and training.

    The workshop demonstrated the need for better information gathering and the fact that the political will to create better evidence based policies now exists in Tajikistan.

    Participants identified three key priorities: improving governance and responsiveness to labour market demands; guaranteeing the quality of education; and boosting social partnership.

  • Current data collection in Tajikistan is clearly inadequate, participants agreed, with data insufficient to allow for correct evaluation of graduates’ skills, the quality of training and whether that training meets labour market demands.

    Drawing up the best indicators for Tajikistan is a first step: in October a second ETF workshop in Dushanbe tackled that very subject.

    “A primary policy aim should be to provide access to quality vocational training for all young people over 15”

  • Alisher Faromuzov, director of Dushanbe’s Vocational Education and Training Support Foundation, says targeting key areas in the national strategy for progress through 2020 is the next step.

    “A primary policy aim should be to provide access to quality vocational training for all young people over 15. Only an evidence-based approach can achieve this. We need to consider the needs of people from several groups including illiterate youngsters, people with poor competitive skills and those from remote mountain villages,” said Faromuzov.

    The ETF’s support in helping create the tools for assessing the true training needs of Tajikistan – on which effective policies can be based – is invaluable, he added.

    “The ETF’s experience in other countries is essential. We need to expand cooperation with politicians, managers and education institutions to involve them in the process of introducing new approaches. The accent should be on increasing knowledge, training and broadening the public policy discussion.”

    Challenges to this include insufficient funding for statistical studies, a need to determine key indicators and encouraging more cooperation between politicians, officials and the ministries affected, he added.

    Tajikistan specialists have already been armed with some powerful tools from the ETF arsenal in this respect: at the June workshop in Dushanbe, the ETF’s Manuela Prina briefed participants on indicators used in European Union countries.

    She introduced participants to the PISA system for evaluating the quality of education and noted that Tajikistan has signed up for the Education for All strategy.

  • Words: Nick Holdsworth, ICE

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