Increasing the Enrolment of Women and Girls in TVET in Africa through the Women in Technical Education and Development (WITED)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is for The PCF10 and on the sub theme “Promoting Equity and Inclusion” at the Tenth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF10), Calgary, Canada. The author discusses how the enrollment of women and girls in TVETs in Africa is being increased through ‘’Women in Technical Education and Development (WITED)’’, a program of the Association of Technical Education and Development in Africa (ATUPA) and supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL). The paper gives: the background to the WITED program; the objective and strategies applied; revitalizing WITED through COL and ATUPA Women in STEM (CAWS) Project; the intended outcomes of the WITED Program and finally the conclusions. The methodology of this paper is desk research combined with interviews of the “WITED Champions”. The authors extensively examine available documents on WITED. The UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development aims to: “eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations” by 2030 (SDG target 4.5); and “achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value” (SDG target 8.5). Equality and non-discrimination are also reflected in the UN’s “Leaving no one behind” framework, endorsed by the United Nation System’s Chief Executives Board for Coordination. Women in Technical Education and Training (WITED) is a program which was initiated by Commonwealth Association of Polytechnics in Africa (CAPA), now Association of Technical Universities and Polytechnics in Africa (ATUPA), with the support of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Commonwealth of Learning (COL) back in 1988. The author seek to evaluate the impact achieved by the programme, the challenges encountered and finally make a call to action by recommending ways by which the programe can reach more girls and women and bring them into TVET programmes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".