Linking TVET Institutions and Industry in Kenya: Where Are We?

Linking of the private sector and the education institutions is a major rising concern in many developing countries. International recommendations of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the improvement of technical education and vocational training systems systematically referred to the need to forge closer links between training and the labor market. In the Kenya vision 2030 on education and training under the social strategy, the government intends to invest in its people by strengthening partnership with the private sector while in sessional paper No. 2 of 1996 on “Industrial Transformation and Development”, the government of Kenya set the target of achieving newly industrialized status by the year 2020. TVET is the pillar in facilitating this and linking with Industry the key to achieving this. Adequate collaboration between Technical and Vocational Education and Training institutions and industries would lead to provision of relevant practical skills for industrialization. This paper focuses on linkages between industries and TVET institutions in Nairobi with the aim of establishing the extent of collaboration between TVET and industry. Survey research design was adopted for the study and simple random sampling technique was applied to select 340 respondents from the study population. Questionnaires were used in data collection. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics in SPSS and results presented in tabular and graphical forms. It was found out that industrial attachment was the most pronounced linkage. Lack of initiative by TVET institutions and poor response from the industries were among the major challenges facing the linking of TVET and industry.