Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is increasingly perceived as the master key to poverty alleviation, sustainable development, and a life of peace, prosperity and freedom. It is considered to be essential to technical training, job generation and employment creation therefore, maintaining its quality is of paramount importance.

Accreditation and certification is often considered a step towards establishing a culture of quality - sustained and maintained by defining objectives, developing capacity to achieve them and evaluating whether they are achieved or not. Being a gatekeeper of quality at its threshold, accreditation determines the adequacy of human, physical and information resources, reinforces results-based approach to evaluation, and provides a firm foundation for its institutions or programs.

Over the years, many schemes of accreditation and certification have been set up by various agencies or organizations. They function in different approaches: institutional, program, or both; voluntary or prescribed mode; national or regional scope; and peer or external evaluation. Nevertheless, accreditation is predicated upon validated standards, criteria and indicators, and as evaluation techniques to provide an accurate picture of the institution or programs being evaluated.

Today’s inevitable global trends have uncovered new and emerging tension points causing TVET systems to change and grow more rapidly dynamic. Indeed, the increasing mobility of the workforce, internationalization of curricula, transnational delivery of programs, credit transfer and electronic delivery modes has posed an overriding challenge – either for TVET TO PERSIST OR TO PERISH.

As TVET needs to be responsive to challenges posed by global trends, so does its accreditation and certification system. The challenges arising from global trends made this a timely moment for accreditation and certification to be re-examined and re-adjusted - its standards and criteria, evaluation techniques, and all its operational aspects in order to exact true measurement of quality and excellence.