Humber College is pleased to announce it has been selected to support the national Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system in Ethiopia. The initiative, led by Asha Gervan, Manager of the International Development Institute and delivered by faculty from The Business School, including Jim Skinner, will equip 50 entrepreneurship instructors in Ethiopia with the tools and skills to design and deliver effective curriculum in entrepreneurship. As Master Trainers, the Ethiopian faculty will also be qualified to provide leadership in this sector to other instructors in the region.  

For this project, Humber is working in partnership with Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT), a leading international social enterprise that operates youth-led economic, education and leadership programs all over the world. The funding is part of a larger Global Affairs Canada (GAC) project to help 200,000 young women and men build entrepreneurial and job skills and use technology to increase their incomes and employment opportunities.

Jim Skinner recently returned from Ethiopia where he was conducting a needs assessment of their entrepreneurial TVET program and working to better understand the capacity of the local instructors. "It’s wonderful working in a place like Ethiopia where the teaching environment is so different from our own,” said Skinner. “We share with Ethiopian faculty an identical task: to get knowledge, skills and attitudes into the heads of our students."

This consultancy is among the several projects run by Humber’s International Development Institute (IDI) that provide unique professional development opportunities for faculty and staff.  Humber’s international development projects contribute to efforts to internationalize the campus, while at the same time making an important contribution to sustainable development globally. “Projects like these are great for Humber, and for our partners," says Gervan. “Not only do we benefit from the opportunity to assist international educational institutions, we also end up learning a lot about how teaching and training methodologies are different around the world. This can have a great impact on our teaching at home.”

For more information on this new initiative, please go to idi.humber.ca/what-we-do/projects/africa/ethiopia.html