Providing Prospects through Bilingual Education

In the small West African state, about half of the approximately eight million inhabitants live below the absolute poverty line. Although the economy suffers from a shortage of skilled workers, it is difficult for young people in Togo to find an apprenticeship or a job and one third of the young people have no employment. This results from the country’s deficient, extremely unequal and ailing vocational training system. There is a lack of infrastructure, equipment and qualified teaching staff. In addition, the contents of the few vocational schools are often not adapted to the needs of the country’s economy. As a result, young people have little opportunity to generate income and escape poverty. However, since young people make up a large part of the population, they need special support and encouragement so that they can have a life and career perspective in their own country in the future.

In the project near Lomé, the capital of Togo, socially disadvantaged young adults are supported by providing them with access to interdisciplinary bilingual vocational training. With training as a basis, the young people have a better chance of positive career prospects, which in the long term helps them to escape poverty and unemployment.

The project was designed as a test project with a limited duration in order to gain experience in the education of indigent high school graduates up to the age of 25. Since access to quality secondary education in Togo is costly, many of the high school graduates are not able to afford education or studies after school. Unfortunately, this often results in parents either having to go into heavy debt to enable their children to access sound education in Togo or even abroad, or that the destitute school leavers often become unemployed. The concentration of young adults on the supposedly better opportunities in the capital Tomé reinforces this unemployment there. With help alliance’s support, 55 young adults a year since 2018 have been able to receive training in a variety of fields, such as tailoring or accounting, at distributed training centers in Togo. An important feature is the bilingualism of the training in German and French. This makes the graduates ideal cooperation partners for German companies and gives them better opportunities on the job market. In addition, the international, interdisciplinary training will turn the high school graduates into qualified workers according to European standards for the national market. In addition to the trainees, the local community also benefits from the qualified skilled workers and the reduction of poverty and unemployment.

Especially in 2019 and 2020, positive developments could be seen in most of the trainees. For example, some of them have formed joint small StartUp groups e.g. tailoring, food processing, electrical engineering, and production of soap and hygiene kits.

Despite delays caused by the Corona pandemic, in which the project and the participants turned out to be an important partner in the fight against the pandemic, the project was successfully completed. So that now in a second phase an own training center will be built.
More information about the follow-up project can be found here. Modern training centre for a sustainable future

However, we still support many other projects in the region.
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