GreenVET4U set out to strengthen Uganda's vocational education system for the green economy. Two of its workstreams have now completed, and between them they answer the question every capacity-building project eventually faces: what remains when the money stops?

The Community of Practice

Aspire set up and coordinated a cross-border community of VET practitioners drawn from public and private sectors across Uganda and Europe, meeting virtually to design solutions to Uganda's green-skills challenges. It was not a conference series. It was a working group with an output requirement.

The Virtual Innovation Lab

Alongside it, Aspire established and ran a collaborative innovation space, built on Coda, where members developed project pipelines. The target was nine fully scoped green-skills project ideas for Uganda, three per year. That target was met.

The proposals include climate-smart agriculture for women, green skills for the tourism sector, and local fertiliser and green-hydrogen development, each scoped against Uganda's Green Growth Development Strategy, which identifies up to four million potential green jobs.

Nine scoped proposals are worth more than one delivered programme, because nine proposals can find nine different funders.

Why those sectors

Tourism and waste management were the focal areas for green micro-credentials, with sustainable agriculture, transport and energy also in scope. The selection follows Uganda's own growth strategy rather than European assumptions about which green sectors matter.

The partners

Six organisations across four countries: Aspire Education Group GmbH as lead, INFODEF in Spain on quality assurance and digital validation, the National Curriculum Development Centre and Makerere University Business School in Uganda, Great Lakes Safaris on tourism-sector entrepreneurship, and Centro Servizi Formazione in Italy on digital technologies.

NCDC's involvement matters more than the partner list suggests. It is central to Uganda's competence-based TVET curriculum development, which means the work has a route into national policy rather than sitting alongside it.

Written from Aspire Education Group project records. For enquiries about this work, get in touch.