Two SKY project members visited Ethiopia between October 8 and 15. The first objective of this short visit was to demonstrate the SKY Game-based training of soft skills (GBT hereafter) to participants of the Africa KAIZEN Annual Conference. The GBT was developed under the financial support of the JICA grassroots cooperation scheme, which started in December 2020. As the 3-year contract with JICA will end in December, we were to disseminate the efficacy of the project outcomes. In addition, taking this opportunity of the trip to Ethiopia, we visited Ethiopian and international organizations to network with potential future partners.

Kaizen Excellency Centre (KEC hereafter) has been our national counterpart during the JICA support, whose new building was just launched this month. They kindly provided us with a space to demonstrate our products, which many participants visited during the coffee and lunch breaks and enjoyed our demonstration of the GBT. Our brochures, policy brief, and country report were well-received, and we received the contact information of people who want to continue corresponding with us for their potential adoption of our GBT.

Demonstrating the GBT to the high officials of the Ministry of Industry.

Thanks to the arrangements by our national coordinator, Mr. Fekadu Nigussi, we managed to make presentations in front of development partners, including the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the Dutch Embassy, which are both active in supporting the skills development of industrial workers in Ethiopia. A group of high officials from the Ministry of Industry expressed strong interest in the GBT as a potential form of intervention to be made under the Industrial Capacity Development Strategy to be renewed this year.

As the KEC is willing to continue the partnership with the SKY team, we will explore the possibility of providing more facilitators’ training for the KEC staff and involving them in the process of developing new GBT for industries other than the garment sector, at which the current GBT is targeted at.

SKY Project members went to Ethiopia for the JICA Africa KAIZEN Annual Conference and networking with potential business partners. Read more about it at https://t.co/vAJLQkCNMT pic.twitter.com/oNlbgoipkO

— SKY Project – Nagoya University (@SKYproject_NU) October 18, 2023