NN38, February 2007
Technical and Vocational Skills Development
TRAINING DISADVANTAGED YOUTH IN LATIN AMERICA: MANY PROGRAMMES, WEAK SYSTEMS
By Claudia Jacinto, IIEP (Unesco) Buenos Aires
KeywordsTraining, youth, Latin America
Summary
Since the nineties there has been a surge of education or vocational training programmes in Latin America, especially focused on disadvantaged youth as part of the struggle against poverty and inequality. This article examines the general achievements and limitations of the strategies adopted.
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Latin American countries are confronted with serious difficulties in the area of social integration and in particular the insertion of young people in the labour markets. Since the nineties, there has been a surge of programmes especially focused on disadvantaged youth as part of the struggle against poverty and inequality. Most of the interventions are aimed at providing either alternative means to finish secondary education or vocational training targeted at poorly educated youth who seldom have access to conventional training. The limited results of such interventions and their approaches have been discussed in technical and political debates and the models of training programmes have been revised with every change in government. However, the strategy of developing public policies on temporary programmes still persists.
Summing up, the general achievements and limitations of the strategies could be noted as follows:
- The adoption of more flexible ways of training - the implementation of courses and projects began by subcontracting public and private agencies offering various types of training, instead of using traditional vocational training institutions. Whereas a certain consensus can be observed about the need to start modifying the state?s inclination to organise social policies (i.e. its institutions, human resources, equipment and infrastructure) from the supply side, the adopted mechanisms - both the ?open market? model and the subsidised programmes - did not yield a high performing vocational training. Instead, they resulted in fragmentary action with more or less quality and efficacy, according to individual cases.
- In spite of its diversification and flexibility, the training organizations experienced difficulties with the design and implementation of the learning. First, they must confront new duties related to curricular design, institutional management, interaction with other institutions and with the labour market, and they do not necessarily know how to respond to these challenges. Secondly, many organizations revealed weaknesses in administrative and economic management. They also showed deficiencies of knowledge about strategies for institutional planning and internal communication.
- One weakness was that almost none of the actions taken promoted links with formal education. The certificates awarded did not, in general, imply any recognition or equivalencies in formal education or regulated vocational training, even though the majority of the enrolled young people did not possess a secondary qualification, and one of the results of enrolling was that nearly 30% of these young people returned to formal education.
Generally speaking, these measures reveal an attempt to provide greater opportunities to young people confronting increasingly exclusive social contexts and more complex labour markets. Its most relevant aspects are precisely the fact that they express the urgent need for a programme and the permanent improvement of its strategies, increasingly emphasizing the use of concrete job opportunities.
Many of the initiatives, however, proved to simplify the problem of integrating young people into the labour market, particularly those belonging to the most impoverished groups. They emphasize the question of low skills level without sufficiently taking into account the role that formal educational levels play in the job market integration, as well as the exclusive tendencies of the labour market itself. In addition, the basic view on young people tends to be short-sighted and does not recognise the diverse nature of the young people targeted: from very marginal and isolated groups (indigenous people, homeless children, etc.), to urban poverty sectors or rural young people. Finally, we should not lose sight of the fact that these initiatives cover only a small fraction of the potential population composed by all the young people who drop out of school without any qualification.
Some recent programmes are now trying new models as a response to some of the limitations or weaknesses in these approaches. We differentiate in this field among the following strategies: a) initiatives promoting completion of primary and secondary schooling for young people and adults through alternative paths to the regular educational, often articulated with vocational training; b) experiences linking training with job integration, c) programmes using ?positive discrimination? mechanisms to help poor youth transition to work (for example, ?sheltered? job opportunities in the public sector or in enterprises).
The central question remains to what extent and by what means these initiatives can contribute to generate a valuable ?second opportunity? for young people from low-income backgrounds, helping them to find better jobs and promoting their social inclusion.
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