Case study: Gambia’s use of sector skills councils to gather labour market intelligence and identify new qualifications and competencies

Gambia’s Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Roadmap 2020–2024, launched in 2019, aims to ensure that the country’s TVET qualifications and courses reflect current and future labour market needs. Research underpinning the roadmap had shown that Gambian employers across many sectors were facing critical skill shortages, despite TVET pertaining to those sectors having been provided. Moreover, despite the existence of The Gambia Labour Market Information System, Gambian employers, policy-makers and TVET institutions reported having low access to regularly gathered and robust labour market intelligence.

To address these skills gaps and to overcome the lack of robust, regularly gathered labour market information, the Gambian government established sector skills councils (SSCs) for the following three sectors: information and communication technology (ICT), agro-processing, and construction. The SSCs provide a formal mechanism for labour market monitoring by giving employers a platform to communicate their skills needs to policy-makers, TVET providers and other key TVET stakeholders. They thus ensure that TVET provision is based on first-hand, sector-specific, labour market intelligence. They also encourage the involvement of multiple stakeholders in the identification of new qualifications and competencies. The SSCs serve an important role, not only in identifying current and future skills needs, but also in setting occupational competence standards, determining priority actions through sector skills plans, developing sectoral qualifications frameworks, and galvanising industry support for TVET design, implementation and assessment.