On 27 August 2025 Sheen met with the Cape Peninsula University of Technology to discuss Luban Workshop initiatives.

What a Luban Workshop is

The Luban Workshop programme is China's vocational and technical training initiative, named after Lu Ban, the 5th-century BC craftsman and inventor. Announced as one of the major initiatives at the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit in Beijing, it has since been established in around thirty countries, with a cluster of workshops across the African continent.

The model is consistent: a training facility hosted inside a partner institution, equipped for a specific technical discipline, with Chinese instructors working alongside local staff so that the teaching capability transfers rather than visits. Fields range from advanced manufacturing and automation through to entirely non-technical trades.

Why the conversation was worth having

South Africa's skills problem in the technical trades is not a mystery. It is equipment, instructor capacity and the distance between what a qualification certifies and what a workshop floor actually requires. A model that puts working equipment inside a university of technology, with instruction attached, addresses all three at once — if it is set up so that the local institution ends up owning the capability.

That was the substance of the discussion: what such a facility would need to be useful in this context, which disciplines are the right starting point, and how it would connect to the rest of the pipeline.

Where Sheen fits

Our own work sits earlier in that pipeline. We teach coding and robotics to learners from the age of six, run programmes in schools, and build the hardware those programmes use. A vocational training facility sits further along — the point at which an interested learner turns into a qualified technician.

The two ends only matter if they connect. A learner who spends primary school building robots and then finds no accessible technical route afterwards is a wasted introduction; a well-equipped workshop with nobody arriving at it is a wasted facility. Talking to institutions at the far end of the pipeline is how we keep our end pointed somewhere.

Universities of technology as partners

CPUT is one of several tertiary institutions we work with in different ways — hackathons, IoT projects, student engagement and equipment. Universities of technology are natural partners for this kind of work: they are practical by design, and the gap between their laboratories and a school robotics club is smaller than most people assume.

Read more about our university hackathon programme, or talk to us about institutional partnerships.