Better Education for Africa’s Rise (BEAR II)

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Promoting and transforming the TVET landscape in Eastern Africa

The Better Education for Africa’s Rise II (BEAR II) is a joint initiative of UNESCO and the Republic of Korea, which will be implemented over five years from 2017 to 2021.

The project supports five Eastern African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, the United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda, in improving the relevance, quality and perception of their TVET systems.

BEAR II draws on the knowledge and experience from the first BEAR project which was conducted in 2011 - 2016 and supported TVET systems in five Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, namely: Botswana, DR Congo, Malawi, Namibia, and Zambia. More information on the first BEAR project can be found here:

Objective and focus areas

The global objective of BEAR II is to give young people in the five beneficiary Eastern African countries a better chance to access decent employment and/or generate self-employment.

The project contributes to global efforts to implement the Education 2030 Agenda, the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (2016-2025), and the UNESCO Strategy for TVET (2016 – 2021).

BEAR II builds on national and regional development plans and priorities of each participating country and on UNESCO’s work in the region including the follow-up to the Mahe Process (2016). It aims to improve national TVET systems by focusing on three key areas:

Making TVET more relevant to the needs of the economy and labour market;
Enhancing the quality of TVET programmes and institutions;
Improving the perception of TVET among young people, enterprises and society.

The project is developed in close partnership with the Ministries of Education and is the result of a series of meetings and consultations with the governments and stakeholders of the TVET sector in the beneficiary countries.

To address the identified issues, the BEAR project supports each beneficiary country in transforming their TVET systems in a perspective of sustainable development through specific sectoral interventions and capacity-building activities in areas such as the agro-processing sector; environmental sector; textiles industry; post-harvest management; agribusiness and creative industries.

For more information, download the leaflet: Better Education for Africa’s Rise II: Promoting and transforming TVET in Eastern Africa, UNESCO, 2017

UNESCO will set up management, monitoring and evaluation structures for the project, and the Republic of Korea will establish mechanisms to monitor and support the implementation.

For more information please contact the Section of Youth, Literacy and Skills Development, e-mail: info.tvet@unesco.org