FG Rebuilds NBTE, Targets 93% Informal Workforce With Skills Revolution
Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
The Federal Government has launched a major institutional overhaul of the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), with the Minister of Education, Dr. Maruf Tunji Alausa, moving to transform the agency into a stronger regulator and driver of Nigeria’s technical and vocational education system.
The reform, anchored on a KPMG-led assessment, is expected to reshape NBTE’s organisational structure, governance framework and operating systems while strengthening its capacity to supervise polytechnics, monotechnics and other technical institutions nationwide.
The move comes as the Federal Government confronts a major skills mismatch in an economy where about 93 per cent of the workforce operates in the informal sector, while nearly 12 per cent of young Nigerians are neither in education, employment nor skills training.
Dr. Alausa said the restructuring was central to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and would place skills, employability and productivity at the heart of Nigeria’s technical education architecture.
The minister said the government’s objective was to ensure that the institutions charged with producing skilled manpower were themselves sufficiently equipped and structured to deliver on that mandate.
“The success of Nigeria’s TVET reforms depends not only on curriculum and infrastructure, but also on the strength and effectiveness of the institutions responsible for implementation and oversight,” Alausa said.
Under the reform programme, KPMG Advisory Services has been engaged to conduct a comprehensive institutional assessment of NBTE and develop a future-fit organisational structure, governance model and operating framework.
The assignment will examine the agency’s institutional gaps, organisational design, workforce capability, operational processes and service-delivery mechanisms.
The recommendations are expected to form the basis of a transformation roadmap aimed at making NBTE more agile, accountable and responsive to the needs of industry and the wider economy.
For Alausa, the exercise goes beyond bureaucratic restructuring.
He described it as a strategic intervention to reposition NBTE as the institutional engine of Nigeria’s skills revolution and strengthen its ability to regulate and coordinate technical institutions effectively.
The NBTE restructuring is coming alongside a major curriculum modernisation drive backed by a N1 billion intervention from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).
The intervention has produced 27 new National Occupational Standards (NOS) and updated four existing standards, taking the total number of reviewed standards to 31.
The standards are designed to create a more integrated skills-development pathway covering artisan-level training, National Certificates, Ordinary National Diploma (OND) and Higher National Diploma (HND) programmes.
Alausa said the reform would make technical education less theoretical and more directly connected to jobs, enterprise creation and industrial productivity.
“Technical and vocational education is fundamentally about skills. Everything within the polytechnic system is ultimately geared towards developing competencies that create pathways to employment, entrepreneurship, and productivity,” he said.
The minister said ongoing curriculum reviews would also ensure that programmes respond faster to technological changes, industry requirements and emerging economic opportunities.
KPMG also identified funding constraints and Nigeria’s existing five-year curriculum review cycle as major obstacles to keeping technical education aligned with rapidly changing labour-market requirements.
The assessment, however, found a major strength that could give Nigeria’s TVET system a competitive edge.
Nigeria ranked second only to Singapore among the countries assessed for the employability of TVET graduates, indicating significant potential for the sector to produce industry-ready manpower if its institutional and curriculum weaknesses are addressed.