Inservice training in Zimbabwe: an analysis of the relations amongst education and training, industry and state

Abstract

An Occasional Paper on In-Service training in Zimbabwe.To a greater extent than many other industrialising countries, Zimbabwe has sought to ensure that externally funded research and study be pursued in ways that relate directly to their own development concerns. If a study is worth permitting, then it should seek as far as possible to address itself to priorities that are consistent with national needs and interests. This implies that if a study is in some measure to serve these needs, there must be a process of renegotiation with the authorities so that the research agenda can be localised. An essential result of this process of localisation must be a reporting back both to the policy community and to the research community during the course of the study. In the case of this present research, this reporting took two forms. At the end of the first three weeks of work, during July 1987, a seminar on results was arranged at the Zimbabwe Institute for Development Studies (ZIDS), and copies of the preliminary paper were provided to the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Education. At the end of the second short trip of two weeks in July 1988, two seminars were arranged. One involved key training directors and training experts from the private sector, including several of the largest enterprises in Zimbabwe. The second was a meeting organised by the University of Zimbabwe’s Faculty of Education, to which the Ministry of Higher Education had invited a number of its senior personnel concerned with the area of in-service education and training