NN38, February 2007
Technical and Vocational Skills Development
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
By Kazuhiro Yoshida, Centre for the Study of International Cooperation in Education (CICE), University of Hiroshima
KeywordsSkills development, in relation to growth and poverty reduction, globalization, late developers, policy options for skills development
Summary
This brief comment summarizes the sources of the recent attention to skills development and analyzes the current efforts being made by developing countries in this area.
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Skills development (SD) is quietly coming back as a hot education issue in developing countries and in international education cooperation. This brief summarizes the sources of the recent attention to SD and analyzes the current efforts being made by developing countries in this area. Trying to define skills development by itself is a daunting task. It takes place at every level of the school system, in training institutions, in firms, and in formal and informal settings. In this brief, SD is taken as largely synonymous with TVET: technical and vocational education and training.
The first set of sources is domestic. In general, the education system in developing countries has been expanding remarkably over the past decade. The primary enrolment ratio (GER) in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the lowest in the world, surged from 80% to 91% in just four years from 1998 to 2002 (UNESCO, Global Monitoring Report 2006). The expansion in the primary education is putting pressure on the second cycle level, including on TVET. Moreover, skills acquisition and application by individuals will play a major role in enhanced national efforts toward poverty reduction and sustainable economic growth.
The second set of sources is external. Various phenomena explained by the term globalization ? e.g. the advancement of ICT and the global penetration of corporate activities - are influencing the government and people of developing countries. This gives unprecedented opportunities for enhancing skill levels and hence country competitiveness and individual upward mobility. But it also poses challenges which could see countries left behind. The World Bank, which advocates changing public roles in TVET from an inefficient service provider to an effective regulator, thus leaving actual provision of skills development services to the private sector, seems more active in this area than in the last couple of decades. Together with the domestic factor, this external factor is raising motivation in students for continued study at the higher education, even in countries where the secondary education system is still only moderately developed.
Needless to say, skills acquired are meaningful only when they are applied. The preceding arguments, although strongly influencing the developing countries, pose the risk of directing SD policies and implementation into being isolated from the demand on the ground or at best ineffective. Successful East Asian cases suggest that late developers have an advantage (cf. Gerschenkron) of being able to make a technological jump, and that strengthening the domestic capacity to absorb and internalize the advanced technology is the key. This has been largely done by the private sector that has basic technological capacity, entrepreneurship, and human resources. In most of the less developed countries today, however, the indigenous private sector is prevalent in the informal setting, and that is deemed inadequate as the organizational platform or foundation for rapid SD. On the other hand, competition for scarce public resources and strong policy advice from aid agencies leave limited scope for expanding or upgrading public SD institutions.
Entry points for assessing the SD environment therefore will include: (1) policy directions ? whether purposes, target skills and target population are clear and consistent, based on the country?s potential and comparative advantage; (2) private sector/labour market characteristics ? whether a critical mass exists that can be a foundation for further and broad-based skills enhancement; and (3) scope for a public-private partnership for SD:- effectiveness of existing public and private SD activities and room for improvement.
With this standpoint and approach, a joint-research is ongoing between a group of researchers in Japan and a counterpart research team in several developing countries ? Cambodia, Ghana, Nepal and South Africa. We are in the first year of the research and hopefully will provide an update before its completion in two more years.
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