The Cape Verdean Prime Minister, Ulisses Correia e Silva, said yesterday that professional training needs to “grow more”, having as its main challenge a greater intervention of the private sector, and promised to increase resources for research and development.
“There is a perception, sometimes wrong, in developing countries, that research, development and innovation is a thing for rich countries, it is not a thing for rich countries, it is a thing for us to become rich, to develop all the capacities of transformations that we have to make and we have an option to increase the level of resource allocation in research and development,” he promised.
The head of government was speaking, in the city of Praia, at the official opening of the forum on technical and professional training in Cape Verde, giving as an example the doubling of resources since 2020 to the National Institute of Agricultural Research and Development (INIDA).
“That has been doing a great job, very useful for the agricultural sector, but we have other areas of research and development that we want to enhance,” he promised, noting that the employability rate of vocational training has been between 70 and 75%.
The Prime Minister also expressed the desire to see this sector “grow more”, launching as main challenge a greater intervention of the private sector in the supply of training actions.
In addition to professional training and entrepreneurship actions, the head of government considered that the important thing is for the sector to “gain scale and dimension”, in order to reach all the islands and reduce regional asymmetries.
“We have the challenge of having at least one technical-vocational school on each island and make sure that we have this coverage,” pointed out the Prime Minister, considering that this will allow us to “change the minds” of people, increasing their capacity for autonomy.