Toyota Malawi donates vehicle to technical college

Automobile students at Lilongwe Technical College (LTC) are expected to be graduating with latest skills, thanks to Toyota Malawi’s donation of a vehicle.

The vehicle, top-of-the-range Toyota Hilux 2.4 Double Cabin global diesel engine pick-up worth K30 million was presented to the college yesterday.

LTC acting principal Suzi Kamvalo said until the donation, the college had been using old model engines for training students and this gave the graduates tough time to adapt to morden engines.

“One of the major challenges that we face is lack of resources to update training equipment. Students were still using the old-fashioned equipment yet after graduating, they were expected to work on modern ones,” said Kamvalo.

Director of technical and vocational training in the Ministry of Labour, Youth, Sports and Manpower Development Aubrey Matemba said the vehicle marks the turning point in the training of students at the college.

He said training institutions and the industry usually blame each other for the skills gap between training offered by institutions and industry expectations.

“The industry needs quality human resource and the training institutions produce the human resource,” said Matemba.

Toyota Malawi managing director Kennedy Kabaghe said 40 percent of the company’s technical staff are alumni from LTC who the company further trains for three more years before they become experts.n