GIZ organized the fourth workshop of the Certification Expert Panel (CEP) for the EU and German government co-funded project that provides technical support to the NCTVA for the “Establishment of a Skills Certification Programme for TVET Graduates”. The meeting took place at the Brookfields Hotel on Wednesday, 12 June 2019.
Purpose
The 3rd CEP workshop in September 2018 ended with the design of a Technical Requirement Catalogue and the profile of the company expected to develop the Integrated Certification Software (ICS). With the selection of iDT Labs as the IT service provider to develop the ICS, the workshop was organized to act as a forum for the said company to showcase how they intend to go about the process and at the same time elicit suggestions from CEP that may be of help in the design and operationalisation of the software.
Statements
The meeting attracted 15 out of the 17 participants from various stakeholders including polytechnics, TVET institutions, employing authorities, government entities and NCTVA.
The workshop was officially declared opened by ING. Mohamed A. Jalloh, Director, NCTVA who welcomed and thanked CEP members and the IDT Labs for their invaluable contributions in the process.
In his statement, Mr. Sebastian Wenz of GIZ highlighted the major outputs that have been achieved so far leading to appointment of IDT Labs, a local IT company to design the software. He hoped that participants would make valuable input to the process as usual.
Technical Presentations
In her presentation, one of the IDT Labs representatives, Ms. Tuzlyn Bayoh, gave a brief background of their organization which included their past achievements and the type of products they offer. Having gone through the issues at stake in respect of NCTVA, Ms. Bayoh affirmed that they have the capacity to develop a robust and user-friendly integrated certification software that would stand the test of time.
The second presentation was done by Mrs. Athira Ramanan. She revealed that iDT Labs would use the ERP framework odoo for the development of the ICS. She explained how they intended to adopt the model-view-controller structure and the access control mechanisms in the process. She also dilated on the UI (user interface) mechanism for both the frontend and backend by means of a prototype version of the ICS. The final product would be a software that will include online and offline registration, result checking and certification.
Discussions
As the group responsible for the provision of technical guidance, the CEP members made some salient inputs regarding some features to be included in the software, especially in the areas of data base management, access rights of various stakeholders, grading system, payment methods with the possible switch over to mobile money and the training of competent personnel to manage the system.
Conclusions
The workshop ended with the understanding that the design, trials, demonstrations and training would be completed and handed over to GIZ and NCTVA by end of October 2019.
