Kenya is positioning itself as a premier training hub for railway training in Africa. After the completion of the first phase of the SGR from Mombasa to Nairobi, there has been a growing demand for qualified railway workers from engineering to customer service.
The University of Nairobi, Kenya Railways Corporation and Beijing Jiaotong University have signed an MoU that will help the institutions build a premium railway training college in Nairobi to support training railway engineers and managers for SGR operations and management at the sidelines of the FOCAC summit.
President of Beijing Jiaotang University Ning Bin met with the delegation from Kenya led by Prof Peter Mbithi, President of University of Nairobi (UoN) and Philip Mainga, Acting Manager Director of Kenyan Railway Corporation (KRC).
The signed the MoU will primarily focus on the construction and cooperation of proposed Kenya Railway College. The delegation also held discussion with the Kenyan students on campus and visited the Traffic & Transportation Experiment and Teaching Demonstration Center.
The signing of the MoU comes a few weeks after the Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Ms Sun Baohong held a meeting with Prof Mbithi on exploring collaboration between University of Nairobi and Chinese universities.
“We have a vibrant Confucius Institute hosted at the University of Nairobi Towers. UoN students have been benefiting from Chinese Ambassadors scholarships every year. Currently, we have a big project going on, the construction of Confucius Institute Africa headquarters that will be hosted at the University of Nairobi,” said Prof Mbithi.
Chinese University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University has started discussions with the University of Nairobi on a Railways Training that will go a long way in training engineers, technicians and human resource capital for the Standard Gauge Railway. The Vice Chancellor requested the Chinese Embassy to consider funding of UoN Teaching and Referral Hospital and the Engineering Science Complex.
“Over 700 people go to China on a yearly basis and 100 students benefit from the Chinese Ambassadors scholarships,” said ambassador Sun Baohong.
