CODATU’s investment in training activities was born out of the association’s observation of the absence of specialised university courses in the field of urban transport and mobility in most French-speaking African countries. This results in a lack of trained manpower to design, plan, implement and manage mobility projects, and an overly systemic recourse to expertise from other territories, particularly from Northern countries, without any real strategy for transferring skills and building local training courses.
Although CODATU has historically been involved in training activities (especially for several years), it is important to remember that CODATU is not a higher education institution. Therefore, all the training projects in which the association is involved are developed in partnership with universities and training institutes. In these arrangements, the association brings its knowledge of the urban mobility sector and local skills development needs, the mobilisation of high-level experts and the possibility of finding internships via its network of members.
CODATU’s investment in training activities is in line with the values and challenges supported by the association and recalled in the Dakar Declaration.
These values and challenges in terms of training can be formulated as follows:
- Train and strengthen the skills of local actors according to the needs identified and anticipated on the ground,
- To develop a teaching method based on peer-to-peer exchanges, giving priority to exchanges between experts from the South as much as possible;
- To facilitate, as much as possible, the employability of the people trained and to ensure a match between the skills developed during the training and the needs identified locally;
- To contribute to local development by trying to develop, beyond the specific training needs, training courses ranging from Bac – 3 to Bac +5;
- To contribute to local development by facilitating the transfer of skills to locally based trainers and training institutions in order to ensure the sustainability of training schemes.
More generally, CODATU’s training objective can be formulated as follows “To contribute to development by supporting the implementation of training courses adapted to local needs and contemporary challenges, by favouring the sharing of experience to facilitate the development of skills and the transfer of knowledge to actors in the South, while considering their employability in the short and medium term“.
