Track: Industry Practices and Solutions

Abstract

This paper anchors and grounds the culture, and architecture of Technical and Vocational Education and Training in Africa which was vibrant and later drowned by colonization. African governments failed to domesticate and embody decolonization curriculum strategies and deploy budgets to promote and enhance heritage based TVET educational philosophies. The TVET DNA architecture in Africa was grounded in various cultural settings from creation. The Creator (God) illustrated the power and philosophy of TVET when He created the universe with all the plethora of living and non-living, Genesis 1. Nations are built and sustained on TVET for Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Systems. The researchers will argue that the tenets of African TVET philosophy were intercepted, interrupted and bastardised by colonization. Resultantly foreign-centric technologies and culture permeate and perpetuate dependency syndrome to the detriment of African Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Systems. Africa is now a vast warehouse for everything foreign inclusive of the education, health, technology and engineering systems. Paradigm paralysis is domiciled in Africa to the extent that industrialisation appears to be a distant cousin having been relegated by colonisation. Drucker (1985) notes that a knowledge society is one in which the quality of life is dependent upon the primary production of knowledge as a resource instead of capital and labour as was the case in the agrarian and  industrial economies. The researcher submits, and proffers possible gateways to circumvent some of these challenges from an African perspective. The research is a mixed mode approach necessitated by the need to unbundle and unpack ontological reality, epistemological and existential shortcomings and shortfalls in the developmental agenda as exhibited by unsupported TVET policies in Africa. Zimbabwe will be at the core of the study.