Tevet to procure equipment for graduates
Technical, Entrepreneurial Vocational Education and Training (Tevet) says plans are underway to procure equipment to be provided to its trainees to ease the challenges of unavailability of tools.
Tevet’s remarks come following revelations that most students who are given the chance to be trained within their location through Tevet have not been given tools since 2011.
According to one of the graduates, Tionge Phiri who did refrigeration and completed in April this year, they are only being advised by Tevet officials to secure loans from the Opportunity Bank instead of rectifying the current problem.
“Every time we go [to Tevet] they only ask us to be patient for the tools and later ask us to get loans from the bank when we actually know that before recruiting us the equipment was already there for us to use upon completing our trainings,” she explained.
However, Tevet information specialist Lewis Msasa told Malawi News Agency (Mana) that procuring equipment takes time and thus students needed to exercise patience.
“Procuring equipment is a process, but all we ask from our graduates is to utilise the chance that we provided to them of accessing loans from the Opportunity Bank to help them out.
“We need our youths to be proactive in various activities and we are determined to equip the young people with skills to make them a better people tomorrow,” he explained.
Msasa also advised the graduates to take advantage of the loan to help themselves in times like these.
“We had an agreement with Opportunity Bank that our youths should be accessing loans from them to start their businesses if the equipment supply is taking too long,” Msasa elaborated.
Research done by Mana revealed that most of the students who enrolled in various programmes including plumbing, brick laying, electronic installation in their institutions based in Chigumula, Blantyre and Magomero in Chiradzulu have not been assisted with the items.
