From Nobody Knows to Everybody Knows (and Giving-Back): The Transformative Impact of Kefeta on Wollo University’s Career Center
Established in 2005, Wollo University is one of Ethiopia’s public universities of applied sciences with three campuses located in the Amhara region. Wubishet Degife Mammo is a Lecturer of Mechanical Engineering. In 2019, he was appointed to also serve as the Career Development and Entrepreneurship Center (CDEC) Coordinator at Wollo’s Kombolcha Institute of Technology campus, and subsequently he was asked to help with career services work at Wollo’s Dessie campus as well. While Wubishet was interested in and excited about the opportunity, he confronted major challenges in his new role almost immediately.
Few Wollo students or academic staff were aware of the career center’s existence. It was minimally established: poorly resourced, disconnected from Wollo University’s organizational and leadership structures, with limited impact on the campus community. Virtually no resources were dedicated to career services. The center has no budget of its own. Wubishet is the only primary career services staff to coordinate support for Wollo University’s student body, which totals approximately 30,000 across 80+ undergraduate programs and 100+ graduate programs.
According to Wubishet, many universities in Ethiopia encounter similar challenges: “there is confusion about the concepts of Deliverology and Career Services … coordinators are appointed, but with no power. Often there is no budget, and not everybody is interested in the work, and nobody knows about the work of the career centers. In some universities, there is a [Career Center] office. In some others, there are no Career Centers. So, there is no common understanding throughout the country about the concept.”
Compounding these issues, the internal conflict in Ethiopia devastated the university’s campuses and physical infrastructure. In Wubishet’s words, Wollo “experienced near total damage because of the war, [where the] university experienced nearly 12 billion Birr damage, and all laboratories and computers have gone.”
When Wubishet returned to Wollo after the conflict, almost all of the Career Center records, plans, training materials, and other documents – not to mention furniture and computers – were looted or destroyed. “When I came back, the story was different, it’s already stolen, and I could not find any data about the center… So, we decided to begin everything from scratch.”
Fortuitously, Kefeta was launched in 2021, and Wollo University was invited to join as a partner. At the center of Kefeta’s higher education intervention is a consortium of public universities and polytechnic colleges in Ethiopia, the Higher Education and Technical Institution (HETI) Alliance (https://hetialliance.org). Supported by Kefeta and higher education faculty affiliated with Arizona State University, the Alliance aims to provide every Ethiopian graduate with a path to employability, through cross-institutional, cross-organizational cooperation among Ethiopian colleges and universities, led by Career Center directors, while also engaging the private and public sector.
