Opportunity-driven Skills and VET in Africa (OP-VET)

The Transformational Potential:

• To achieve a systemic and sustainable change with the potential for large-scale impact in the area of employment creation in support of investment and value chains development.
• To strengthen human capital through VET and skills development so as to train young people in a way that responds to the opportunities of the labour market, starting from the concrete needs of the private sector and to improve local benefits.

The Team Europe Proposal:

The initiative consists of three building blocks:

1. Technical Assistance (TA) facility providing support based on requests from EU Delegations, EU Member States or private sector organisations to identify employment opportunities and required skills needs around flagship initiatives and translate findings in targeted recommendations for VET system support responsive to identified employment opportunities;

2. Regional exchange on Public-Private-Partnerships to promote opportunity-driven VET and skills development in SSA, and to create a space to allow for practical exchange between public and private stakeholders on active partnerships. This includes a linkage to relevant Erasmus+ financed actions on capacity building for PPP in VET to strengthen EU-Africa engagement on skills;

3. Competitive Funding mechanism to finance regional and multi-country VET initiatives in support of (regional) value chains that complement country MIPs, as well as actions that more generally support this paradigm shift of reverse engineering VET in function of employment opportunities market dynamics create.

The initiative will use a gender responsive lens and address marginalized groups (disabled, migrants, rural) for an inclusive and comprehensive approach to VET and skills development.