Morendat Centre Of Excellence To Provide Oil & Gas Courses To Meet Region’s Skills Shortage

The Kenya Pipeline Company’s  (KPC) Morendat Centre of Excellence is set to provide technical courses in oil and gas as the country grapples with skills shortage ahead of the development phase.

Morendat facility in Naivasha will initially offer six courses namely Oil Pipeline I&C Technician; Oil Pipeline Mechanical Technician; Oil Pipeline Operations Technician; Oil Pipeline Laboratory Technologist; Oil Pipeline Fire Officer and Oil Pipeline Legal Officer skills the company has been using millions to hire expatriate workers.

‘In the ongoing replacement of the Mombasa-Nairobi oil pipeline, we have had to import welders and coaters from China, Lebanon and Nigeria,’ he told participants during the planned school’s oil and gas pipeline curriculum validation workshop,” KPC Managing Director Joe Sang told stakeholders in a recent curriculum validation workshop in Nairobi.

The event was officially opened by the Principal Secretary for Vocational Technical Training Dr Dinah Mwinzi. The PS observed that with the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the region, massive manpower training and development in the sector is more urgent than before so as to build capacity of our economies to handle the oil infrastructure that will go with these discoveries.

‘Curricula are as good as the people who develop them and we should all know that curricula determine the type of future we bequeath our children,’ Dr. Dinah said as she encouraged the participants to critique the Centre’s curriculum so that we can give the country and region the best skilled manpower.

The former don said that the school is set to increase the country’s stocks of skilled laborers in the nascent sector.

Other speakers lamented that foreigners were undertaking jobs that the youth could do under the local content provision which the Centre of Excellence in oil and gas pipelines will provide.

“As a company we’ve decided to have this school so that our young people can get the opportunity to advance their skills in oil and gas,” added Joe – the chief executive of one of Kenya’s most profitable public institutions,” Sang added.

The of Curriculum Development and Assessment Certification Council (CDACC) through its chairman Prof Charles Ondieki lauded Morendat’s curriculum terming it the first competence-based curriculum in the history of Kenya.

Morendat Training and Conference Center (MTCC) was first proposed as a Centre of Excellence during the 3rd Heads of States Summit held in Kigali, Rwanda, on 28th October, 2013, when member states agreed that such centres for capacity building be created in order to support the Northern Corridor Integration Projects (NCIP).

MTCC was thereafter designated Centre of Excellence for Oil & Gas Pipelines during the 7th Summit of the NCIP held in Kampala, Uganda in October 2014 with the aim of developing human resource capacity for Partner States in Oil & Gas Pipelines Management, Operations and Maintenance to reduce dependence on expatriate human resource.

The school will be the first in the region and the third in Africa after Sonatrach in Algeria and Transnet in South Africa.

Other oil and gas related courses intended include: Legal and Regulatory Framework for Oil & Gas Pipelines, Pipeline Maintenance & Welding, Pipeline Design and Construction, Pipeline Project Management, Right of Way Management as well as Instrumentation & Control