I wrote a newspaper article in 1983 about the fate of students graduating from Technical and vocational schools who had very few options to further their education. Since then, many more private and public vocational schools have been created. Also, some teacher training schools have been created or attached to existing universities to train young students in vocational and technical schools. Many private institutions have been created to train young people for the ever-growing hospitality sector in hotel and restaurant management. The University of Ngaoundere has trained hundreds if not thousands of process engineers who could support the food processing or transformation sector.
Have all these efforts solved the problem raised in my 1983 newspaper article? Not quite, if at all. Graduates from technical and vocational schools still have very few options. There is the hope that companies will absorb some of the young people into their work force to provide technical services in maintenance or factories. These hopes are still a wild wish because our Country still has to develop the secondary sector.
The way out of this dilemma is very apparent. The youth with technical and vocational skills may have the solution to the creation or development of our secondary sector. This can only happen if businesses are created to use the skills that the youth have acquired. In other words, youths with technical and vocational skills need entrepreneurial skills so as to employ themselves and create jobs.
In DMC via the newly created academy, we are launching applied technical and vocational entrepreneurship.