Stakeholders push for TVET reforms to bridge skill and industry gaps

Kathmandu, Sept 19: “Our youths are migrating abroad for employment, local industries continue to suffer from a shortage of competent, skilled labour. Reconciling this glaring mismatch requires reading between the lines of Nepal’s Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reform crisis.”
Stakeholders representing local governments, academia, technical training institutes, development partners and industries have univocally raised the issue while pushing for technical vocational education and training (TVET) in Nepal.
At the ‘TVET Sharing and Collaborative Reform Workshop’, organized by the Kathmandu University (KU), in collaboration with Biratnagar Metropolitan City (BMC) in Biratnagar on Friday, the panellists and participants advocated for a formal and functional tripartite collaboration connecting local governments, technical training institutes, and private sector employers.
Technical and vocational education is uniquely positioned to improve the employability of youth and adults, ease the skills constraints facing employers, and support inclusive economic growth.
Nepal’s young population offers a window of demographic opportunity — one recognised in the country’s policy architecture, in the TVET Sector Strategic Plan (MoEST, 2022) and the Fifteenth Plan (NPC, 2020).
But the promise is not automatic. In many low- and middle-income countries, TVET institutions deliver what they know how to deliver rather than what students and employers actually need — and that broken link between supply and demand is what prevents these systems from realising their potential.
Decade-long study exposes systemic gaps and industry disconnect in technical education
A comprehensive evaluation of Nepal’s TVET school system, which was presented on the occasion, also highlighted a critical disconnect between course offerings, institutional quality, and market demand, revealing declining status of TVET in a decade.
Jointly conducted by researchers from ETH Zurich (Chair of Education Systems) and Kathmandu University School of Education (KUSOED) under the Swiss-backed “QualiTY” project, the study reveals that structural bottlenecks and low industry linkage are severely impeding the sector’s performance.
Presenting key findings of a multi-year national census covering nearly 1,000 technical institutions, KUSOED’s Assistant Professor Dr Prakash Kumar Paudel highlighted that despite a national capacity of 81,000 students and policy targets set at 90% enrolment, actual student enrolment has dropped sharply. “While total system capacity steadily grew to over 81,000 places by 2024/25 (2081 BS), enrolment rates have dropped from nearly 100 percent a decade ago to roughly one-third of capacity. Over the past six years, 17 percent of technical schools failed to enrol a single student while below 10 percent ran continuously at full capacity”, the findings stated.
The study noted that traditional disciplines like engineering and agriculture—historically the backbone of TVET—are collapsing, toward around 20% of capacity. In contrast, health/nursing programmes and dual-TVET (apprenticeship) are thriving, nearly 80 percent.
New schools are found entered regularly, but this turnover means the system keeps losing accumulated.
According to the findings, only about 50 percent of TVET schools operated without interruption over the past six years. While constituent public schools maintained a nearly 100 percent survival rate, private institutions saw a six-year survival probability.
Based on self-assessment indicators aligned with Nepal’s new accreditation framework, average schools failed to hit the 60 percent passing benchmark in every assessed category. Overall, schools cleared only 6 out of 27 key quality indicators.
To bridge the gap between classroom instruction and real-world employment, education experts and practitioners call for critical reforms, including aligning course supply with market reality, and enacting the TVET Act to end governance ambiguity.
Likewise, the study suggested formalizing corporate partnerships in TVET school governance, integrating hands-on workplace learning directly into standard curricula and fast-track School Accreditation for transparency, and establishing Open Data systems to standardize administrative records into accessible, interoperable platforms to enable real-time monitoring and evidence-based planning.
Implementation Laboratory (iLab) as a Model for Reform
The Implementation Lab (iLab), a platform to bring together stakeholders from different sectors to collaboratively identify, test, and implement TVET reform initiatives, was initiated in Nepal. It was grounded on the findings that TVET reform cannot be achieved by a single institution or level of government alone, rather requires collaborative action among government agencies, industries, academia, training providers, and practitioners.
On the occasion, former Dean of KUSOED, Prof Dr Mahesh Nath Parajuli detailed the evolution of the iLab, a collaborative platform running from 2023 through 2025 with support from the Swiss government.
Designed as an action-oriented testing model, iLab forms multi-disciplinary, volunteer teams that develop and implement practical solutions to TVET challenges within six-month timelines.
Recent iLab initiatives have introduced modular, technology-friendly classrooms with integrated laboratories, as well as school-to-work transition frameworks that directly link students to industrial placements.
Reflections and commitments from stakeholders for reforms
Chief Guest at the event, Biratnagar Metropolitan City Mayor Nagesh Koirala, along with local governments’ representatives pledged to advance a tripartite collaboration linking local governments, technical training institutes, and private sector employers. Koirala, however, called for the federal government to take the lead for coordination among multiple stakeholders, highlighting the need of decentralized, need-based curriculum.
Likewise, newly-appointed Vice-Chancellor at the KU, Prof Dr Bibek Baral, former Dean Prof Dr Mahesh Nath Parajuli, Professor Dr Prakash Chandra Bhattarai and KUSOED Department Head Dr Suresh Raj Gautam reaffirmed KU’s commitment to discharge its role to propel the TVET reform agenda through knowledge production, outreach and community engagement.
Division Chief at the Koshi Province Ministry of Social Development, Laxmi Neupane, reaffirmed the provincial government’s commitment to prioritizing TVET reform. Neupane urged researchers to incorporate school-level technical streams (Grades 9–10) into future studies and noted that the findings from the iLab event will directly inform upcoming provincial legislation and policy formulation
Sharing that some local initiatives have been already introduced in Koshi province to minimize demand-supply gaps, Chair of the Chamber of Industries, Koshi, Chair Kishor Rathi, said establishing business incubation centers to foster entrepreneurship among students in grades 8–12; aligning TVET curricula directly with private sector needs, creating an 11-member TVET Reform Forum and formulating a five-year roadmap covering Morang, Sunsari, and Bhojpur districts, and offering local incentives, such as a 5% tax exemption package by local municipalities to motivate youth engagement and retain talent are among the showcasing examples.
Chair Rathi and industry representatives committed to formalizing partnerships, updating curricula to match labor market needs, and collaborating continuously on employment and training.
Likewise, Chair of Education Systems at ETH Zurich Prof Dr Ursula Renold emphasized continuous engagement of the actors and stakeholders in the TVET ecosystem to reengineer Nepal’s education and advance country’s prosperity.
She expressed the commitment to support Nepal’s bid to push for the evolution of technical vocational education.
The conference also offered opportunities for three cohorts of iLab – Pratikshya Guragain, Ganesh Dahal and Chudamani Bhattarai – to share their experiences to demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborative approaches in driving practical reforms within the TVET system.
As Nepal moves toward the formulation of a new TVET Act, there is growing recognition that provincial and local governments will have a crucial role in shaping and implementing TVET policies and services. However, the roles and responsibilities of provinces and municipalities remain insufficiently articulated in the current policy discourse, partly due to limited awareness and engagement of sub-national actors in the reform process.
The workshop featuring representation from 200 diverse participants concluded with a shared understanding of reform priorities at sub-national levels and support collaborative planning for the future development of Nepal’s TVET sector.
— RSS