KENAPCO chair calls for skills revolution to drive Kenya’s economic growth
The Mt Kenya Times 
KENAPCO Chairperson Dr Ekrah Ndungu planted a commemorative fruit tree in the Institutions Orchard corner
Ekrah Ndung’u argues that practical competence, not paper certificates, must sit at the heart of national development
By John Kariuki
Kenya’s TVET sector has found a consistent and credible voice in Ekrah Ndung’u, the National Chairperson of the Kenya National Association of Private Colleges (KENAPCO), whose interventions yesterday renewed pressure on policymakers to place practical skills at the centre of the country’s economic agenda.
With youth unemployment persisting and the gap between classroom training and industry demands widening, Ndung’u’s message was direct: Kenya cannot build a competitive economy on certificates that do not translate into competence.
“There is no private student and no public student; every student is a Kenyan,” she said — a line that captured the core of her argument for equal access to government financing for learners in accredited private TVET institutions. Her advocacy, she made clear, is not a lobbying exercise on behalf of private colleges. It is a call for fairness, inclusion and a stronger national skills-development system.
Ndung’u also challenged the country’s traditional fixation on academic degrees, pointing to a global shift that Kenya cannot afford to ignore. China’s higher education overhaul offers the starkest illustration: between 2021 and 2025, Chinese institutions scrapped or suspended 12,200 undergraduate degree programmes deemed obsolete, replacing them with more than 10,000 new courses aligned to industry and technological priorities. The message, Ndung’u argued, is clear — modern education systems must evolve alongside their economies.
Germany, South Korea and China, she noted, have long recognised TVET not as an alternative for those who cannot access university, but as a strategic pillar of economic development. Economies require technicians, engineers, healthcare workers, digital specialists, artisans and construction professionals — and it is TVET, not the lecture hall, that produces them at scale.
Her proposal for public-private partnerships — enabling institutions to share equipment, facilities, trainers and expertise — drew particular attention. Such arrangements, she argued, would expand access to practical training while making better use of resources already within the system.
Ndung’u is, in essence, asking Kenya to change how it measures educational success: not by how many certificates are issued, but by how many competent, productive and innovative young people enter the economy. Her voice, increasingly heard on international platforms, is one Kenya’s education and economic planners would do well to heed.
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