The Engineering Board of Kenya has begun a pilot on overhauling the engineering curriculum in the country to align it with the market requirements.
This comes as the industry players now eye stakeholder collaborations to spur growth in the education sector and address the market demands.
Erastus Mwongera, the chairman of EBK said that the state department of Roads will be the first in the pilot before extending the same to other departments.
"We are making this practical, where we will start with the roads, we are linking the academia with the industry to do research and universities can use that information for teaching engineering lectures and make them professionals," Mwongera said.
This comes even as the country continues to record a shortfall in professional consulting engineers.
Of the more than 20,000 registered engineers in the country only 5 per cent are consulting engineers with the remaining being graduates.
The country has a total of 20,013 graduate engineers, 2,535 professional engineers, 208 temporary professional engineers and 498 consulting firms.
Experts say that skills mismatch in the country has been a result of weak linkage between education and industry leading to unemployment, which disproportionately affects the youths, who account for 75 per cent of the current population of around 50 million people.
The Kenya Youth Policy Development Report shows that youth aged between 15 and 34 years form the highest percentage of persons who are not in employment, education or training.
Mwongera added that in an effort to bridge the shortage of engineering consultants the board is planning to increase the number of professionals to about 10,000 by 2027 in line with UNESCO requirements.
According to the chair the move will bring professionalism in the sector that has been on the spotlight in the past few years following collapse of buildings that have claimed lives.
"We have given professionals engineers stamps so that they can authoritatively stamp their reports and designs to enable the authorities know it's from recognised engineers," Mwongela said.
However, he said some engineers in the construction sector have been casual with the stamps leading collapse of buildings.
