The CESET team met for their first meeting following the UK summer holidays. The focus of the meeting was on energy learning East Africa. To support the development of CESET’s Regional Energy Learning Alliance, we were delighted to welcome guest presenter Guy Cunliffe from Transforming Energy Access Learning Partnership. TEA-LP launched in 2019. The TEA-LP was a partnership across 8 Universities, mostly East Africa, that provided support to develop post grad curricula that specifically responded to the energy access sector in a multidisciplinary way i.e. focus was beyond engineering into areas like finance, policy development and social skills with the aim to produce well rounded graduates. Part of the process had been working with educators at the Universities to develop curricula that was dynamic, responsive and provided students with professional career development so that they were workplace ready.
This was followed by a presentation by Getachew Bekele on research work to date on energy learning capacity in Ethiopia. Getachew and the Ethiopian Team - Amare, Dawit and Adugnaw - had used a combination of questionnaire and interviews to identify how key stakeholders think about policy impact, what were the current capacities for energy learning in East Africa and an overview of the professional context of energy learners i.e. content and quality of courses, who takes them and what do they do afterwards.
Following presentations, the CESET team considered synergies and complementarities between TEA-LP and CESET. Discussions are planned to develop the partnership into 2022.