Presentation of the Continental TVET Strategy 2025–2034 at the Official Opening of the 2^nd Edition - Africa Skills Week 2025 Theme: "Powering Africa’s Industrial Future: Skills for Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability” by H.E. Gaspard Banyankimbona, AUC Commissioner for Education, Science, Technology and Innovation,

AUC Headquarters October 14^th, 2025, from 9:00 – 10:30

• Your Excellency Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, Chairperson of the African Union Commission
• Your Excellency, Muferihat Kamil Ahmeda, Minister of Laber and Skills, The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
• Honourable Ministers,
• Excellencies, Ambassadors,
• Honorable Members of Parliaments,
• Valued Partners,
• Industry Leaders
• Innovators
• Young Africans
• Distinguished Delegates, Dear Colleagues,
• Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a privilege for me today to present to you the Continental TVET Strategy 2025–2034. In summary, the strategy is a renewed continental framework to empower Africa’s people with the skills to drive innovation, industrialization, and inclusive growth. The Strategy is a blueprint for Africa’s future as it places skills at the heart of economic transformation, turning the continent’s demographic dividend into a productive, creative, and resilient workforce.

Last year, in Accra, Ghana, the inaugural Africa Skills Week sent a powerful message: that skills are the missing link between potential and prosperity.

We witnessed Governments, Industries, and Youth co-designing solutions, from digital apprenticeships to green TVET curricula, that are already reshaping labour markets.

Building on that momentum, this second edition in Addis Ababa must catalyse concrete, continent-wide implementation.

Why a New Strategy?

A decade ago, the AU launched its first continental TVET strategy under the Second Decade of Education. While it laid important groundwork, a mid-term review revealed persistent gaps:

• TVET systems remained largely supply-driven, disconnected from the dynamic needs of agriculture, manufacturing, energy, ICT, and tourism, the very sectors powering Africa’s industrial future.
• Governance remained fragmented, with overlapping mandates across ministries and weak coordination between education, labour, and industry.
• Financing is insufficient and unsustainable, with public investment averaging less than 2% of national education budgets in many African countries.
• Women, rural youth, and informal workers continued to face systemic barriers to quality training.
• And critically, TVET has not kept pace with the twin revolutions of digitalization and climate action, despite their centrality to the African Union Agenda 2063.

We cannot industrialize without skilled hands. We cannot innovate without skilled minds. And we cannot achieve the Africa We Want without a workforce that is alert, adaptive, and future-ready.

Vision and Mission

This Strategy is anchored in the AU Vision 2063: “An integrated, prosperous, and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens.”

Its mission is clear: To cultivate a globally competitive, innovative, and inclusive African workforce, equipped with the technical, entrepreneurial, and green skills needed to power industrialization, drive sustainable development, and create decent jobs for all. At its core, this Strategy reflects the AU’s conviction that Africa’s wealth lies in the talent and ingenuity of its people.

What Makes This Strategy Different?

The Continental TVET Strategy 2025–2034 marks a paradigm shift, from training for employment to empowering for enterprise; from isolated interventions to integrated ecosystems; from Certificates to competencies that matter in real economies.

It champions four transformative imperatives:

1. Inclusion & Equity: Ensuring TVET reaches women, rural youth, persons with disabilities, and those in the informal economy, recognizing that domestic work, artisanal crafts, and agro-processing are dignified professions deserving of formal recognition and support.
2. Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Embedding creativity, design thinking, and intellectual property literacy into curricula, so that every TVET graduate sees themselves not only as able job seeker, but also as able job creator.
3. Digital & Green Skills: Preparing learners for the jobs of tomorrow, renewable energy technicians, AI-augmented artisans, circular economy specialists, and climate-resilient farmers.
4. Validation of Informal Learning: Formalizing the vast reservoir of skills in Africa’s informal sector, where over 80% of youth acquire their first trade. through Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and portable certification.

Strategic Focus and Foundational Pillars

The Strategy advances two interconnected goals:

1. To guide Member States in developing and implementing transformative demand-driven, high-quality national TVET policy and systems;
2. To guide the African Union and its institutions and organs, RECs, regional mechanisms, AUDA-NEPAD, and partners in implementing this strategy
3. To strengthen continental coherence through harmonized standards, mutual recognition of qualifications, and regional mobility.

Three principles guide this transformation:

• Alignment and Relevance: Ensuring TVET strategy aligns with development strategies and socio-economic policies for maximum impact and coherence.
• Excellence with Values: Promoting high-quality, ethical, and value-driven TVET programs that meet international standards and local needs.
• Co-creation and Partnership: Building strong partnerships for co-creation and knowledge sharing in TVET across all stakeholders and sectors.

To achieve the intended objectives of the Strategy, we stand on four foundational pillars:

1. Policy, Governance & Sustainable Finance

• Establish unified national TVET authorities
• Leverage innovative financing: industry levies, public-private partnerships, and results-based funding

2. Quality, Relevance & Inclusion

• Embed occupational standards co-developed with industry

3. Scale work-based learning,

• Partnerships & Knowledge Sharing

• Institutionalize Industry Advisory Boards in every flagship TVET institute
• Promote regional collaboration, such as the Harmonized TVET Qualifications Framework for East Africa, which now enables mutual recognition of 204 qualifications

4. Institutional Capacity, Technology & Innovation

• Equip TVET Institutions as Centres of Excellence
• Accelerate digital transformation: e-learning, smart classrooms, and AI-enabled career guidance

Call for Collective Action

Excellencies, this transformation cannot be led by governments alone. It demands a new social contract for skills:

• To Member States: Integrate this Strategy into national development plans and protect TVET budgets as social investments, not really expenditures.
• To the Private & Productive Sector: Move beyond Corporate Social Responsibility to strategic co-ownership, fund training, host apprentices, co-design curricula, and hire TVET graduates.
• To Development Partners: Align support behind country-owned systems and avoid duplication to focus on  building sustainability.
• To Africa’s Youth and Women: Step forward as innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Your ideas will power Africa’s factories, farms, and digital platforms.

Closing: A Promise to Africa’s Future

The Continental TVET Strategy 2025–2034 is is a promise:

• A promise that no young person will be left behind because they chose a technical path.
• A promise that African industries will find the skilled talent they need at home, ending the paradox of unemployment amid skills shortages.
• And a promise that Africa will adapt to the future of work and most probably shape it if the Member States take ownership of the implementation of this strategy

Let this Second edition of Africa Skills Week be remembered beyond its declarations. Let us leave Addis Ababa in the next four days with clear ideas on national roadmaps, industry commitments, and youth pledges to turn this Strategy into reality.

Because when we invest in the hands that build, the minds that innovate, and the dreams of Africa’s youth today, we prepare for and create the future at the same time and that future is industrial. Innovative. Inclusive and Sustainable. That future has a name, its name is the Africa We Want.

Thank you.