Client Context

Skills shortages in East Africa are not primarily a shortage of training institutions. They are a shortage of connection between them. A regional flagship institute may hold specialised equipment that neighbouring vocational centres cannot access. An industry may need dual training arrangements that no single institution can offer alone. A qualification earned in one country may carry no recognised standing in the next, even where the labour market is genuinely regional.

EASTRIP was designed to address this by investing in regional flagship TVET institutes across participating countries, serving sectors such as transport, energy, and manufacturing where labour markets and infrastructure corridors span borders. But investment in institutions does not by itself produce a system. For the flagship model to work, the relationships between training providers, between institutions and industry, between levels of government, and between regulators and awarding bodies all needed to be defined, agreed, and made operational.

The Challenge

Designing collaboration across a system this fragmented meant reconciling four distinct institutional layers, each with its own mandates, incentives, and legal constraints. Training institutions and programmes, national and county governments, industry, and regulators all needed workable, legally feasible arrangements for sharing equipment, providing mentorship, enabling trainee mobility, delivering dual training, and recognising qualifications across borders.

The framework had to be specific enough to be operational and flexible enough to accommodate different legal and institutional environments in each participating country. A document that only worked in one jurisdiction would have failed the project’s regional purpose.

Our Approach

ACAL structured the technical assistance around the four collaboration layers the project needed to make functional, treating each as a distinct design problem before integrating them into a single framework.