A first-of-its-kind workshop for African World Plumbing Council (WPC) member organizations was held alongside the WorldSkills Africa 2025 capacity-building program for Plumbing, hosted at the Fountain Gate Craft & Trades School in Lusaka, Zambia, from Sept. 1-5. This workshop assembled a team of proactive WPC representatives from Zambia, South Africa, and Rwanda for a first in-person meeting of WPC member organizations on the continent.
The workshop aimed to lay foundations for a new WPC Africa committee, strengthening collaboration in the plumbing and WASH sectors and helping to drive strategic development in the region.
IAPMO and the International Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Foundation (IWSH) played a prominent role throughout the week, furthering their global mission of workforce development and social impact under IAPMO’s ten-year Global Industry Partnership with WorldSkills International. IAPMO helped support training activities and competition standards development for the WorldSkills Africa capacity-building component of the event — working together with participating plumbing instructors from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Namibia and Ethiopia — while IWSH also introduced a new collaboration with the Rothenberger Tools for Life Foundation (T4L) which provided additional hands-on plumbing masterclasses to the WorldSkills group. Further to this, T4L instructors ran a parallel training workshop for more than 50 local trainees of the host organization PAZA (the Plumbers Association of Zambia) and donated all tools to these participants at the end of that activity. These various training sessions gained widespread attention via the T4L instructors’ social media channels (@nample and @thepeakyplumber), reaching more than a million views during the event.
The WPC and IAPMO also hosted a mid-week evening reception celebrating all WorldSkills Africa 2025 partners and participants, and at the conclusion of the week’s events, each WPC Africa attendee received a commemorative Lusaka 2025 IWSH challenge coin.
This initiative has created a platform for future collaboration between WPC member organizations in the region, with potential outcomes including formation of new national plumbing associations, development of codes and standards, and TVET system enhancement in partnership with WorldSkills Africa stakeholders. The newly formed WPC Africa workgroup will begin meeting regularly online starting in October 2025 and target their next in-person workshop to be co-located with another appropriate plumbing industry event in Africa in 2026.
