Game
Krishna Sapkota
Kathmandu, Sept 19: “Our youths are migrating abroad for employment, local industries continue to suffer from a shortage of competent, skilled labour. Reconciling this glaring mismatch requires reading between the lines of Nepal’s Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reform crisis.”
Stakeholders representing local governments, academia, technical training institutes, development partners and industries have univocally raised the issue while pushing for technical vocational education and training (TVET) in Nepal.
At the ‘TVET Sharing and Collaborative Reform Workshop’, organized by the Kathmandu University (KU), in collaboration with Biratnagar Metropolitan City (BMC) in Biratnagar on Friday, the panellists and participants advocated for a formal and functional tripartite collaboration connecting local governments, technical training institutes, and private sector employers.
Technical and vocational education is uniquely positioned to improve the employability of youth and adults, ease the skills constraints facing employers, and support inclusive economic growth.
Nepal’s young population offers a window of demographic opportunity — one recognised in the country’s policy architecture, in the TVET Sector Strategic Plan (MoEST, 2022) and the Fifteenth Plan (NPC, 2020).
But the promise is not automatic. In many low- and middle-income countries, TVET institutions deliver what they know how to deliver rather than what students and employers actually need — and that broken link between supply and demand is what prevents these systems from realising their potential.
Decade-long study exposes systemic gaps and industry disconnect in technical education
A comprehensive evaluation of Nepal’s TVET school system, which was presented on the occasion, also highlighted a critical disconnect between course offerings, institutional quality, and market demand, revealing declining status of TVET in a decade.
