NN38, February 2007
Technical and Vocational Skills Development
SWISS AGENCY FOR DEVELOPMENT AND COOPERATION, SDCNEW CHALLENGES IN SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
By Ruth Huber, Swiss Development Cooperation, Bern
KeywordsSkills development, SDC, disadvantaged groups, life-long learning
Summary
Skills Development is a powerful instrument to reduce poverty, but it has to respond to new challenges: to broaden the access to affordable training, assuring the inclusion of disadvantaged groups and to develop relevant training offers for life-long learning. But expanding quantity and quality of training requires new funding mechanisms.
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Skills Development (SD) is a crucial and multi-faceted instrument towards the reduction of poverty and therefore has been promoted by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) for more than three decades. Over the years, changes in the context of developing countries made it necessary to adapt the approach in order to offer opportunities to the increasing numbers of poor people working in precarious conditions in the growing informal sectors and to disadvantaged groups in rural areas. SDC therefore reoriented its support from the classical, mainly school-oriented approach of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) to the larger concept of skills development, including work and life skills, which can be acquired through a combination of formal education, competency-based training, non-formal and informal learning. Today SDC?s overall goal in this area is to contribute to sustainable systems for education and training, which are accessible to the poor and assure a relevant, demand-oriented training offer.
SD serves a twofold purpose: to provide the national economies with the labour force needed for competitiveness and growth and to enable young school leavers, the unemployed and other job seekers to perform gainful economic activity for a better living. Under a poverty reduction focus, national SD systems therefore have to respond to the following challenges: to broaden the access to affordable training, assuring the inclusion of poor and marginalized groups of the population and to support the development of relevant, good-quality training offers which encourage life-long learning.
In order to reach the inclusion of disadvantaged groups, the availability and affordability of SD have to be massively increased. This implies the need to lower entry points and access barriers to SD courses, to define multiple exit and re-entry points from and into SD, to develop special facilities responding to difficult personal conditions (regarding timing, location, methodology etc.) and to include entrepreneurial skills directed at self-employed activities.
The orientation of SD systems towards life-long learning means that training becomes shorter, happens more frequently and its contents are more relevant, responding to the market demand (of the labour market in the case of employed work, and the market for goods and services in the case of self-employed). This implies ? among other factors ? that formal, non-formal and informal modes of learning coexist and are recognised; that dividing lines between general and vocational education become blurred and that National Qualifications Frameworks and open assessment become essential elements of national systems.
There are many good practices for either of these strategies: For example the broadening of access to short, employability-oriented training modules in Albania, which were developed by ISDO (Increase Skills Development Opportunities) development project and then expanded at national level by the Ministry of Labour. With regard to increasing relevance and demand orientation of trainings, CAPLAB in Peru (a former development project and today an NGO) has reached interesting results, creating permanent mechanisms to observe developments and demand of the labour market and involving private sector companies in the development of new occupational profiles and the assessment of trainees.
But in order to attack both challenges - to expand both quality (relevant training stretched over longer period of time) and quantity - requires the exploration of new funding mechanisms. Possible sources may be the introduction of productive modules in training or the increasing co-financing by individuals and companies themselves, who may be more willing to invest in further training in life-long learning schemes; companies may do this due to the relevance of specific training, and individuals may pursue this due to the income reached after the first modules. But in addition targeted donor support seems unavoidable, at least temporarily, until national education systems can absorb the cost.
There are certainly many other challenges for SD which would be worth discussing here: to enhance linkages and synergies with basic education, or to render SD systems more flexible, attracting more private training providers, just to name a few. But undoubtedly SD is a powerful instrument ? especially if complemented by active labour market policies and business promotion measures ? for contributing to pro-poor economic growth and for raising opportunities of poor ? but trained and empowered ? people to increase their income and to improve the livelihood of their families.
This article reflects elements of the new strategy of SDC for the promotion of Skills Development, elaborated with support by W. Schlegel and G. Kohlheyer from INBAS Belgium/Germany.
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