Luban Workshop
Luban Workshop
Explainer: What’s Luban Workshop?
Luban Workshop is a Chinese international vocational training program designed to combine China's experience in vocational education and hardware resources with local human resources.
‘‘Since the first Luban workshop outside China was setup in Thailand on March 8, 2016, by the Tianjin Bohai Vocational Technical College, sponsored by Tianjin Bohai Chemical Industry (Group) Company Limited, China, through the project continues to share its vocational technology and culture with the world – deepening cooperation between Chinese educational institutions, government agencies and enterprises with their foreign counterparts. Named after Lu Ban, a Chinese craftsman of the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC), who became famous for inventing tools, the Luban workshop, which follows this spirit of craftsmanship has over the past seven years been at the forefront of innovating vocational education worldwide – supporting countries to cultivate highly-skilled talents.
As of November 2023, a total of 27 Luban workshops have been established in 25 countries including Britain, Cambodia, Portugal, Pakistan, Indonesia and India. For participating countries, especially those located in resource-poor regions, the Luban workshop is increasingly indispensable to national efforts dedicated to eliminating barriers to human capital development, industrialization and agriculture modernization – contributing to enhancing local capacity-development in various industries. In Thailand, where the first Luban workshop outside China was set-up, the project located at Ayutthaya Technical College, has over the past seven years provided vocational training to 13,000 students. Students at the workshop receive hands-on training in modern teaching and learning facilities including a high-speed railway training center founded in 2018 by the Tianjin Railway Technical and Vocational College. Benefitting from advanced Chinese vocational training education including new technologies, Thailand, through the Luban workshop has trained highly-skilled professionals for key sectors.
According to Tanu Vongjinda, secretary-general of the Thai Vocational Education Commission "The courses offered by the workshop have precisely met the demand for high-quality talent in Thailand's industrial and transportation sectors," Tanu also revealed that "The workshop can be regarded as the commission's pride in having created a model for other educational institutions to promote vocational education management worldwide." Faced with a deeply concerning socio-economic phenomenon where nearly 7 in 10 out-of-school or unemployed youth in Thailand lack the motivation to develop skills or seek work, due to a perceived lack of opportunities, according to a new UNICEF-led study (2023), the Luban workshop has become an invaluable resource, contributing to national actions expected to tackle this daunting challenge.
Faced with similar challenges, Africa, considered the continent with the least skilled workforce in the world, a condition that partly accounts for the region’s decades-long slow growth is also benefiting from the Luban workshop. In March 2019 Africa’s first Luban workshop was setup in Djibouti – over the past four years, China has established 12 workshops in 11 African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, South Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt – jointly collaborating with local education authorities to provide the continent’s bulging youth population with vocational training designed to foster agriculture modernization, advance industrialization and support human capital development. In Djibouti, the Luban workshop which offers 4 majors: rail engineering technology, railway operation and management, business and logistics, all certified by local education authorities – has trained 69 local teachers and 148 students – the project has also achieved one of its goals, thus, to cultivate local talents for the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, a major project under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).’’ – Excerpt from the Ghana Centre for China Studies (GCCS) publication titled ‘‘Luban Workshop: Charting a New Path to Global Capacity-building’’
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