Technical Education, Vocational and Entrepreneurship Training Authority (TEVETA) has disclosed that only three percent of women were enrolled in science and technology related programmes offered by the authority between 2015 and 2020.
Speaking in an interview, TEVETA Public Relations Officer, Clive Siachiyako says government can mitigate this by coming up with job incentives that will motivate female students to enroll in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related programmes.
What other countries like China and Qatar have done is to create bursary and job incentives, where those who do science and technical programmes get jobs quicker than those in social science programmes,
he said
The demand by students, especially women to enroll in science and technology programmes has been very low over the years due to reasons such as lack of jobs.
Siachiyako further urged the Ministry of Education to recruit more teachers specialisedn in science and technical subjects in order to ensure that more pupils gain interest in science and technology.
There are few teachers teaching science subjects, so when pupils migrate to tertiary education, they are not adequately prepared,
he said
In short, most students perform poorly at tertiary level due to the poor foundation at secondary school.