Collaboration between the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) has led to the introduction of a new capacity building programme to tackle the skills shortage in the field of development economics and industrial policy.

The DTI on Monday announced that it has appointed Wits’s Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development (CSID) research programme, a university-based research centre headed by Seeraj Mohamed, to assist it with the challenge of policy development and capacity building in the department.

Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said that the programme would train existing and potential DTI staff in specific work areas, as there was currently a shortage of suitably qualified employees, particularly in the area of industrial policy.

Wits deputy vice-chancellor professor Yunus Ballim said that the new programme had emerged from the “separate, but complementary” responsibility for skills development that higher education institutions and government shared.

“Higher education institutions and governments should partner for skills development, as the development base is at universities,” he noted.

Davies added that the new capacity building programme was one of the DTI’s most important training initiatives, as it would support the deployment of the industrial policy action plan, or Ipap, which was itself designed to support industrialisation and job creation.

“Existing programmes are too narrowly focused on general, mainstream theories. The reality of the global economic crisis revealed the inadequacy of such general economics theories,” he noted.

Deputy director-general Nimrod Zalk, who has responsibility for Ipap, added that economics as discipline had, to date, not fully tackled domestic developmental challenges. The new programme aimed to change that, owing to the fact that it was developed to create a new cadre of economists who would understand and support the emerging new economic growth path and industrial development.

“South Africa lost significant industrial capacity and jobs during the recession, which directly influenced the level of success the country can achieve in industrial policy. This programme will improve our economic competitiveness,” Davies pointed out.

The capacity building programme would comprise a certificate programme in economic development and policy, which would start in April 2011.

It would also include honours and masters degrees in development theory and policy, starting in February 2011 and 2012 respectively.