NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 30 – Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote says his group will establish an engineering training school in Lamu County to equip 1,000 Kenyans with skills needed to work at the planned Dangote East Africa Refinery.

Dangote said the training programme will prepare engineers and other professionals ahead of the completion of the refinery, which is expected to create about 60,000 jobs in Kenya.

“I want to assure you we are coming here to set up a training school that will train 1,000 of your people. Anybody who has an engineering degree, diploma programme or whatever, tell him that he has a job. His job is guaranteed,” Dangote said.

He said the scale of the refinery would require a large pool of engineers and other skilled workers, making it necessary to develop local expertise before operations begin.

“Because when you build an industrial project of this scale, you do not simply build a refinery, you build possibilities around it, which none of us can quantify,” he said.

Dangote said the training programme would also help Kenya build the technical capacity needed to develop future industrial projects without relying heavily on foreign expertise.

“I know that at the height of the project, we are going to have a lot of engineers. But what this will do is that going forward in the future we do not have to go and bring Chinese, Indians or so to come and build our infrastructure here. We are going to build capacity here,” he said.

The proposed refinery will have a processing capacity of 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day, making it the largest refinery in East Africa and the second-largest on the continent after Dangote’s refinery in Lagos, Nigeria.

The facility is expected to supply refined petroleum products to Kenya and neighbouring markets, including Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reducing reliance on imported refined petroleum products.

The project is estimated to cost Sh2 trillion, down from an earlier estimate of Sh2.2 trillion. About 70 percent of the financing, equivalent to approximately Sh1.4 trillion, is expected to come through debt.