Brief History of Jimma institute of Technology (Formerly called Faculty of Technology /College of Engineering and Technology)

The establishment of the FoT can be traced back to 1997(1990 E.c) when the government decided to expand the then Jimma institute of Healthy science (founded in 1983) beyond healthy fields and upgrade it into a full –fledged university with the opening of faculty of technology and faculty of business and economics. Upon its establishment, the faculty consists of three departments namely civil Engineering Department, Electrical Engineering Department and Mechanical Engineering Department. The first batch graduates from the regular program appeared in 2002.Since then the faculty has been producing competent graduates and contributing its share to the development of the country. With the intention of diversifying its study programs, the launching of two additional programs in engineering fields were made. This has led to the establishment of Water Resource and Environmental engineering department and Biomedical Engineering department. With this the number of engineering department has increased to five. Initially study period of undergraduate engineering departments were five years. However, due to the reform introduced in to the educational system of the country, it was reduced to four years.

JU is one of the pioneer public higher institutions who have started the study and implementation of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).As part of the university FoT was an active participant. With the implementation of BPR in July, 2009 the faculty is changed to college of engineering and technology and becomes one of six colleges in the university. Upon this arrangement three computing departments namely Computer Science department, Information Science department and Information Technology departments were incorporated to the college, raising the total number of departments in the college to eight. One of the biggest achievements of the college in the study program is the opening of postgraduate program in the field of Sustainable Energy Engineering by 2010.

As part of JU the faculty embedded in its program the philosophy of the university i.e. CBE programs. This program paired the means of exposing student to the wider real problems of the community and problems of the community in particular, equipping them with skills of problems of the target communities, and strengthening partnership with surrounding community and sector offices. The college is in big move toward opening relevant programs depending on the needs of the country namely chemical engineering and software engineering.

overty and dependent on foreign aid, man power and construction companies. The use of expatriate man power and foreign construction companies has resulted or forced the country to meet the requirement or stringent criteria set by them incur more cost than expected. JiT is a unique institution that from its inception has charted distinct pathways to academic excellence. It has been aptly described as the "First Community based Institution in Ethiopia,"broad in scope, open and accessible to all. JiT from the beginning developed a curriculum that incorporates the need of the society, industry and focus on the design, construction, installation manufacturing and operation (management) of infrastructures. This plan identifies broad directions for the institution and wide actions for implementing those directions. The focus is on issues that crosscut or transcend the boundaries of departments, and other units of the institute, while recognizing that the locus of implementation for many of these actions is and must be in administration and departments. The plan does not refer to or analyze particular academic or administration units.