TVET Community Report

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Dear TVET forum members,

You may recall our earlier message regarding setting up a TVET directory for Sub-Saharan Africa — many thanks to all those who contributed to this (see here). Since then, with the help of those who have responded, we identified relevant literature and have undertaken a comprehensive literature review of the TVET research literature on TVET in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as conducted numerous interviews. Our results are summarised in a 160-page report (in English).

In our work so far, it has become clear that those TVET community members who are interested in research (on TVET in Sub-Saharan Africa) are looking for opportunities to participate in research networks, to further develop their research skills and to publish.

This led us to the view that our final report should not be a product of the current authors only, but — assuming there is interest from the community — become a ‘community product’. We, therefore, propose to initiate a ‘structured community review’, during which the above report is systematically reviewed by a larger number of community members (drawn in part from this forum). Everybody who contributes will be acknowledged. Those who contribute significantly (e.g. by adding case studies or similar) will be acknowledged as chapter (co-)authors or (in case of significant contributions across the report) as report (co-)authors.

In addition to opening up the report in this way, the ‘structured community review’ (SCR) is also an experiment to see whether it is possible for the TVET research community in Sub-Saharan Africa to come together and act together. In this first instance, this ‘acting together’ is to undertake the SCR and produce a shared research output. We hope that this will pave the way for the TVET research community in Sub-Saharan Africa to continue acting together in other ways (e.g., joint research, joint capacity building, etc).

Finally, I’d like to stress that the term ‘TVET research community in Sub-Saharan Africa’ is meant to be inclusive, rather than exclusive. It should include all researchers with an interest in TVET in sub-Saharan Africa, thereby encompassing: TVET practitioners, educationalists, sociologists, economists, members of relevant government departments, members of TVET authorities etc, those located in both sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, and encompass a diversity of language (English, French and Portuguese) – while the report is in English, our team includes both French and Portuguese speakers, and discussion in these languages will also be encouraged.

We are currently finalising the draft report and hope to launch the SCR in early April. We expect the discussion to continue for 3-4 weeks. We will (1) initially pose some general questions for discussion (using a mailing list), then (2) review the report together, chapter by chapter (again, using the same mailing list), and (3) finally undertake some focus-group discussions (this may be by email, or using voice over IP, e.g., Skype or Hangouts, etc).

If you are interested in participating, please use this sign-up form http://bjohas.de/go/scr-signup (Google Forms). The form is in English, but you can also respond in French or Portuguese. Please also comment below if you prefer the form itself to be in French or Portuguese.

Please feel free to share this message with others outside the forum. If you had previously responded to our earlier post (see above) then we will also notify you by email.

Many thanks,

Björn, Melissa, Joe, Asseta

Björn Haßler
Björn Haßler