The Organization of African Petroleum Producers (APPO) has outlined a four-point roadmap aimed at restructuring training, certification and digitalisation across Africa’s oil and gas sector.
Speaking at the 4th Forum Of APPO Training Institutes in Tripoli, Libya, which brought together training centres and institutes from APPO member countries, APPO General Secretary, Farid Ghezali, said the continent’s training ecosystem remained too fragmented and poorly coordinated to support a sustainable transformation of the sector, despite Africa’s energy resources, institutions and talent.
Ghezali said the Forum was intended to be an action-oriented working session rather than a protocol event and should produce tangible progress and a realistic roadmap for member states, training institutions, companies and young professionals.
He outlined four priorities to guide the sector going forward. The first is the development of a common training catalogue across APPO member countries, which he said would serve as a strategic reference tool listing available instructions, specialties, training levels, access conditions and cooperation opportunities, rather than a simple administrative list.
The second priority is a framework agreement between member countries’ training institutes and centres, designed to move cooperation from one-off arrangements to a structured and sustainable footing. Ghezali said the agreement should support the exchange of experience and good practice, encourage mobility of trainers and learners, enable pooling of resources, and support joint programmes between institutions.
The third priority, according to him, involves certification and continental recognition of training courses, alongside preferential or symbolic tariffs for learners from member countries, which he described as both a matter of African solidarity and a strategic investment in the continent’s human and industrial capacity.
The fourth priority is the digitalisation of training cooperation through a dedicated APPO platform, which the organisation has already begun developing. He said the platform is meant to centralise information on training institutes, make programmes and the common catalogue more accessible, track member countries’ needs and monitor commitments made under the proposed framework agreement, including mobility, joint programmes and certification.
Ghezali said the underlying aim of the initiative was to build energy sovereignty through sovereignty of skills, arguing that sustainable transformation of the sector depends on institutions capable of training, certifying, and digitising the workforce that will drive it.
He urged participants to approach the Forum’s work with frankness, ambition and responsibility, describing it as an opportunity to lay the foundation for a more coherent, digitalised and credible African energy training space.
He thanked the Libyan government, the Ministry of Oil and Gas, the National Oil Corporation and the host institute for organising the Forum, describing Tripoli as a city with a significant place in African history and a symbol of the continent’s resilience and reconstruction.
