The Role of Private Sector Financing in the Development of Technical and Vocational Education in Nigeria

Around the world, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) has been acknowledged as a means of enabling individuals, particularly the younger generation, to achieve sustainable livelihood and socio-economic advancement. This study analysed the influence of private sector financing of education and government capital and recurrent education expenditure on technical and vocational education enrolment rate in Nigeria. Empirical research on how private sector education financing has affected technical and vocational education enrolment from the secondary data perspective remains under-researched in academic literature, and this serves as a motivation for this study. The independent variables included private sector financing of education, government capital expenditure and government recurrent expenditure on education. The dependent variable was the technical and vocational education enrolment rate in Nigeria. The data were time series data collected from the Central Bank of Nigeria, National Bureau of Statistics and National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) for the period 1990 – 2024. Auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model was used in analysing the data. The three null hypotheses formulated were rejected, which led to the conclusion that private sector financing, government capital expenditure and government recurrent expenditure on education have significant effects on technical and vocational education enrolment rate in Nigeria. While government capital expenditure exerted a significantly negative effect on technical and vocational education enrolment rate in Nigeria, recurrent expenditure and private sector financing had a significantly positive effect on technical and vocational education in Nigeria. The study recommended that since the private sector is profit-oriented, liaising with government-owned technical and vocational institutions through the public-private partnership agreement will instil quality in TVET education, and when the private sector is encouraged to own technical and vocational training centres, it will ensure the sustainability of TVET education financing in Nigeria.