Off and away with another exhilarating week in Uganda….its day 8 (12 Feb 18)
After breakfast we set off to visit St Simon vocational institute
We met with Father Joseph who advised:
- Started in 1986
- 6 courses: tailoring, catering,motor vehicle, welding, building & construction, carpenters & joinery
- Originally boys school for 40 students
- Some girls because of culture
- 3, 6 , 9, 12 month short courses which are modular – DIT curriculum
- BTC sponsored 30 people, who work and study DIT
- UBTEC is another curriculum
- Most students are boarding
- Much construction in plan fir 5 to long term 20 years
- Have partners to sell products
- Have cows , cocoa and agriculture area, funds given to scool
- 410 in 2017, 500 expected 2018, Target 700 as formalities are built
- VP: 32 years,brand awareness in community, students if high quality
- Marketing: 1 skilled person to be recruited
- Creating reserve fund for expansion and projects. Different account fir each revenue stream like carpenters, salary, admissions etc
- Start forum yo go to community with one voice
- Lacking real model
- People see VTI as failure rather than university
Then, Millennium vocation institute
In simple words this is a hotel and catering niche institution with a demonstration hotel. Students here learn most things about the niche including additional activities like washing machine , service, basic computing etc
A super hit in my opinion because they specialise in one industry
Then we busted one of the outreach centre who specialise in welding. We discovered about 8 students from NVI who worked together to make gates
Lunch was at the Hoima hotel, buffet style.
We then returned back to the hotel for 1:30pm to finalise Worksop content and alignment on research and toolkit
At 5:30 we had a storm with about 45 minutes of tropical rain
The day ended with a beer and some great Ugandan food
It’s back to the room for some final preparation on the workshop…..it begins tomorrow!!!
To remember: photocopying of 2 sheets x 15 copies can take 3.5 hours (don’t ask!!!), then still was unsuccessful. LUFE US NIT SIMPLE!!!
