Morogoro

Its katie writing on my last night in Tanzania. Claudine left on Monday to return to Canada and I continued on to Morogoro with Christopher and Saronga from Mikumi and Emmanuel Ngallah from World Jet to participate in a symposium for all 12 ACCC Education For Employment projects in Tanzania. The meeting included presentations and discussions with representatives from VETA institutes, Canadian Colleges, relevant ministries, CIDA, and some reps from the private sector (but very few....). The symposium will present recommendations for the potential next phase of EFE projects in Tanzania and EFE in other countries.

The symposium was launched by the Minister of Education and Paul Brennan from ACCC. Paul talked about the crisis in the middle east in terms of a revolution of young unemployed people who need skills training and jobs (in the EFE model of course!). he made a compelling argument. Tanzania is a very peaceful country now, but the young population will not likely

We were invited to present our project as a case study and all four of us were able to share our perspectives on the value of the project, early sucesses and ongoing challenges. The presentation went very well and we had a few nice compliments, including one rep from the ministry of education who said she had heard that there were 'big changes at mikumi' and that they are the VTC to watch... nice to hear, but we still have lots of hard work to do!!

One of the the persistent themes in the symposium was the gap between the training institutions and the private sector. Our team has come up with an exciting pilot project to test a way to bridge that gap, and we shared it with the symposium and got some really good feedback. We are planning to have Saronga's second year students on a special field attachment at World Jet for two weeks prior to our tourism students/faculty arrival in May. They will be assigned with preparing to tour our group through the village museum and provide top level tour guiding baed on two weeks of research and preparation and exposure and experience with World Jet supervision. The Mikumi students will be evaluated by Emmanuel, Saronga and Adam (our NSCC tourism faculty leader in May) and will have a record of their performance to use in their portfolio for future employment opportunities. A simple idea, but will require commitment and input from Emmanuel, Saronga, our NSCC team and the students themselves of course. We will evaluate the pilot and share the results with the EFE teams for possible replication in their fields.

Exciting stuff, and a good way to end my time here. Was also great to reconnect with friends and colleagues from ACCC, the Marine Institute and NSAC and meet new people involved in similar projects. I think everyone feels motivated to continue, but now the hard work of continuing the momentum once thousands of kilometres are between us, knowing all our communication challenges and competing priorities.

Heading off to the airport, so I am signing off from Tanzania.