Exporting talent – the untapped TVET opportunity

By Theodore SUTHERLAND

Industrialization is critical to improving the value of commodity agricultural exports, reducing our import bills and creating high quality jobs. UNIDO projects that Africa’s manufacturing output could grow from US$500 billion today to US$1.7 trillion by 2030, potentially creating 14 million jobs. If Ghana leads West Africa in industrialization capabilities, we can become a regional manufacturing and agro-processing hub, producing for nearby countries, further accelerating our economic development and diversification.

To do so, we need skilled technicians, welders, fabricators, and electricians: the workforce that technical and vocational education produces. President Mahama has announced a target to lift manufacturing from 10percent to 15percent of GDP by 2030, creating 500,000 industrial jobs. In practice, that ambition lives or dies on investing in and raising the bar of our TVET capacity.

While TVET has historically had a stigma for those who aren’t intellectually gifted, it is regaining prominence as TVET offers a higher job conversion rate than other education paths (ACET research). Ghana’s TVET enrollment is up nearly 180percent to serve 73,000 people from 2020 to 2025. Governments could arguably have a higher return on investing in TVET skills as the value of many university degrees falls with increasing AI disruption. With Ghana allocating only 2percent of its education budget to TVET compared to peers like Ethiopia at 10percent, the gap reflects both competing priorities as well as fiscal constraints. Innovative financing approaches are needed to create a larger budget pool.

An untapped opportunity is deliberately training and exporting TVET talent. A structured approach to doing this, like the Philippines has modelled, helps address limited financing, which is a root issue to improving and accelerating quality education.
Global TVET demand is booming

Developed nations face technical labor shortages they cannot solve domestically. The US faces a 330,000 welder shortage. Germany projects losing 7 million workers by 2035 and needs 400,000 skilled immigrants annually. Welders and metal workers are the most critical shortage occupation across Europe. These workers are essential for building data centers and other infrastructure that power everyday life and economic growth.
Wealthy aging societies need skilled tradespeople, and Africa has the depth of youth to fill the gaps.

Germany has already acted on this reality, signing labor migration agreements with Kenya, Morocco, and others. Kenya’s deal includes a pilot quota of 5,000 trainees and 2,500 professionals for 2026, and a Skills Transfer Fund to co-finance Kenyan TVET colleges. Workers get 30-day visa processing and tax-free re-entry when they return with German qualifications. Ghana is in active conversation for a similar agreement for labour mobility to Germany. The question is whether we are ready to supply what the world needs.

To meet this opportunity, there are three critical enablers:
Pursue international accreditation
While curriculum-employer relevance is often highlighted in education reform, we rarely set expectations of the standard to which we are training talent.

The Design and Technology Institute (DTI) in Ghana is the first education institution in Africa to secure the American Welders Society certification. As a result, talent trained and certified in their program are recognized as being capable of achieving international standards and hence can be recruited and benchmarked to talent globally. Training talent to meet world standards is an essential enabler for students’ economic mobility, and it also raises the calibre of talent that local employers hire from as well. The export pathway and the local industrialization pathway share the same enabler – higher standards of excellence.

Scale models of excellence
While one world-class facility is a breakthrough, our industrialization goals require dozens. How do we get there?
Bangladesh’s Center of Excellence for leather workers created a one stop shop for all skilled talent needs for the industry. It was uniquely championed by the private sector and enabled by government’s TVET reforms, and resulted in a staggering 95percent job placement rate for the 12,000 people it trained. Visionary private sector partners are key to scaling and sustaining effective models of excellence.

Ashesi University’s Education Collaborative offers a complementary approach. The Collaborative brings together a network of higher education institutions to study, share, and scale proven approaches. Rather than each institution reinventing solutions independently, the network identifies what works, documents it rigorously, and supports replication across member institutions. The Collaborative now reaches over one million students across Africa through this approach.

TVET needs similar infrastructure. Institutions like DTI and Ashesi should not operate in isolation. The regulators who accredit TVET programmes and the foundations who fund them have outsized power to shape the sector. They should invest in studying what makes these institutions successful, codify lessons into updated standards, and tie incentives like accreditation, funding, recognition, to adoption of proven practices.
The World Bank’s EASTRIP project across Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia demonstrates this can work at scale. Across 16 Regional Flagship TVET Institutes, training capacity increased tenfold and graduate employment rates jumped from 47percent to 79percent. Over 500 programmes now have industrial partnerships embedded.

Policy that unlocks financing
Scaling requires government action on three fronts: domestic enablement, international agreements, and financing innovation. Domestically, policy must make it easier for private partners like DTI and Ashesi to build and innovate, but also proactively attract model education institutions to set up in Ghana.

This means streamlined and modernized accreditation processes, tax incentives for new universities and industry partnerships, and seeding shared infrastructure like testing centres and certification facilities through public-private partnerships. Ghana’s NDPC and DTI are already advancing a national Human Capital Development Strategy targeting “dual TVET”: the German apprenticeship model where learners spend four days weekly in industry.

These of course need to be done in conjunction with aligning enabling policy for the private sector, domestically and internationally, to inform and hire from this talent pipeline; ultimately private sector demand should drive any such investment for talent to ensure job pipeline sustainability.
Now TVET institutions have permission to earn while teaching, and the next step could look like reforming public procurement to include TVETs as suppliers for products and services aligned with their training mandates and government’s procurement needs. Together holistic approaches like this create revenue streams while producing job-ready graduates with real production experience.

Internationally, Ghana should consider treating labor migration as trade policy. This means negotiating bilateral labor agreements that include skills transfer provisions, worker protections, credential recognition pathways, and structured return mechanisms. Germany’s Kenya deal includes a “Kenya Desk” at the Federal Employment Agency to accelerate credential recognition and Philippines has instituted the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority which oversees skills training and certification for overseas deployment and reintegration. Ghana should pursue similar arrangements across Europe, the Gulf, and North America.

A viable financing mechanism is remittance capture. The historic high of US$7.8 billion Ghana’s diaspora sent home in 2025 emerged without deliberate policy; that amount is 4x our total direct foreign investment for the period. The Philippines has demonstrated what becomes possible with coordination: remittances now comprise 9percent of it’s GDP, supporting not just household consumption but increased capacity to invest in under-resourced areas. A structured diaspora engagement strategy, including bonds, matching funds, and targeted remittance incentives, could channel a portion of these flows back into education financing like TVET, creating a cycle where our investment in our youth generates the funds for training.

Opportunity, not dependency
A proposed talent export strategy is not a blanket endorsement of foreign market dependency. In fact, countries with remittance-to-GDP ratios above 20percent tend to underperform regional peers on growth; this is a cautionary tale of not building credible investment options for returning remittance capital. The Philippines’ experience offers both model and caution: while labor export has become central to economic strategy, critics argue it has reduced urgency for domestic reforms. Every solution will have trade offs to wisely and proactively mitigate to ensure sustainability and national progress.

The goal is not to export all talent, but to create viable win-win options. Young Ghanaians with internationally-certified skills can choose: build a career at home serving domestic industry, or pursue opportunities abroad with credentials. Either path benefits Ghana. Those who stay strengthen local industry. Those who leave send remittances, build networks, and return with capital and expertise.

Time to act
Today, educated Ghanaians are migrating anyway. Our national strategy to orchestrate and capture national benefits is weak and sub-optimized at best. The question is whether we continue doing so or whether we build the institutional infrastructure to turn talent export into a deliberate national strategy.

Ghana is uniquely positioned with models of excellence like DTI and Ashesi. The demand exists: 330,000 welders needed in the US alone, millions of skilled tradespeople needed across Europe, and our local markets need processing capabilities. These dynamics are also true in other global high demand jobs like nurses and teachers. Today, the pieces of the puzzle are on the board and eagerly waiting for visionary orchestration and execution.
What bold and innovative approaches to accelerating TVET are we ready to take?

>>>Theodore Sutherland is an educator who believes Africans can lead on the global stage. He is the former president of African Leadership College, a UK-accredited STEM university, whose graduates have launched global companies, work at Facebook and Google, and study at Cambridge and Harvard. He can be contacted via Linkedin @tsutherl

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