Human Resource Development

Goal

Build human capital to address the development challenges of the Eastern Cape Province.

Programme Purpose

The main aim of this programme is to identify and develop critical skills that are required for the development of Eastern Cape Province across all sectors of the economy.

The Programme

The Human Resource Development programme in ESCECC has grown out of the secretariat for the provincial JIPSA Council. In 2006 the South African Government put in place the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA) in order to address the skills shortages in the country. The Eastern Cape Provincial government established a JIPSA Council in 2007. The JIPSA council is made up of representatives from provincial and local government, the Legislature and key institutions in education, training and skills development in the Eastern Cape and South Africa. In 2009 the council was renamed the Human Resource Development Council (HRD Council)

ECSECC is housing the HRD Council secretariat to support the overall implementation of the initiative. The Human Resource Development programme is responsible for planning of strategic interventions to address critical skills needed in the province. The programme is also responsible for conceptualising and facilitating strategic planning and programme design for Eastern Cape institutions, informed by national and provincial policy frameworks.

The programme’s activities are inspired by the notion of human capital development. This captures the idea of developing the individual and collective abilities of people to make a meaningful contribution to the domains in which they find themselves. Human capital development incorporates the dimensions of institutional and human resource development and thus opens a broad understanding of developmental processes.

Further, four assumptions underpin ECSECCs work in the area of human resource development.

Our approach to development work is cognisant of structural and historical factors that lead to conditions of disadvantage (social, economic, political) and we are mindful of the limitations that this imposes in terms of what is developmentally possible within medium term programmes. Therefore our approach is to infuse critical awareness as part of our strategic responses especially of how power relations perpetuate conditions of disadvantage or how transforming it can yield a transformed reality.
Transformation seems to be addressed by government and many other agencies in a number crunching and grid-like fashion notably in their mode of analysis of social and economic deficits in society. Our interpretation of transformation is informed by a people-centred approach that seeks to transform self-perceptions and its relation to how social processes and phenomena inhibit personal and collective development. The approach is not deficit based but acknowledging of the resources that people bring to developmental processes.
Developing capacity among and in the generality of the population is a central theme in our approach and in doing so contextual realities of deprivation are factored in to how strategy and programmes are conceptualised.
One of the concepts that are common to the policy frameworks is the idea of operating in a developmental state which implies among other things, an interventionist angle on developmental work.

HRD Projects

Public Private Partnership (PPP) between ECDOE, MERSETA and Mercedes Benz SA/Daimler AG on automotive mechatronics.
Systemic Audit in the FETC Sector
Skills Indaba
Policy Dialogue: Towards a shared understanding of the education crisis
Language transformation
Promotion of participation of Industry in Artisan Development
Dual University Engineering project