Deputy President calls for forum between SA, Japan universities
25-APR-06
This, she said should be in the context of the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa).
She was addressing a breakfast meeting attended by presidents of Japanese universities to discuss cooperation opportunities between the two countries’ high education institutions.
The Deputy President was on an official visit to Japan and Indonesia as part of her mission to popularise ASGISA in Asia.
Explaining Jipsa, she told the meeting that it was a “concrete” step to support the country’s education institutions to produce graduates in line with the demands of the economy.
Launched in March this year, Jipsa, a high-level task team whose job is to identify urgent skills needs and advise on ways to respond to such challenges, is a critical building block in terms of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa).
Asgisa is aimed at identifying skills that are critical to growing the economy to six percent by 2014 and therefore tackling skills shortage as a key focus requiring attention.
“South Africa has to overcome the shortage of suitable skilled labour for us to realise an annual growth rate of at least 6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2010 and 2014,” she explained.
According to the deputy president, the proposed forum for universities could be held annually in Japan and South Africa on a rotational basis to help achieve these objectives.
“The objectives of the forum would be to increase flows of scientific knowledge and resources between South Africa and Japan through participation in joint education, research and training programmes.
It is also to share best practices in education, research and training through the exchange of students, researchers and managers between South Africa and Japan.
In addition, it would facilitate the participation of South Africa and Japan as significant players in the international science and technology arena.
She further outlined priority areas that South Africa had identified for cooperation with Japanese universities.
These included high-level engineering and planning skills for network industries, transport, communications and energy - all at the core of the national infrastructure programme.
She also indicated that city, urban and regional planning and engineering skills needed by local municipalities were a priority.
Singled out as critical were artisan and technical skills, with priority attention to those needs for national infrastructure development and management, and planning skills in education, health and in municipalities.
“We are further focusing on teacher training for mathematics, science, information and communication technologies (ICT) and language competence in public education.
“There are specific skills needed by the sectors such as Tourism and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and cross cutting skills needed by finance; project managers and managers in general.
“Moreover, we need skills relevant to local economic development of municipalities, especially developmental economists,” she said.
By Themba Gadebe – BuaNews
