NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
Skills for the Marginalized Youth: Breaking the Marginalization Cycle with Skills Development
By Guy Bessette, CIDA, Gatineau, Canada
Email: Guy.Bessette@acdi-cida.gc.ca
Keywords: Technical and vocational education; marginalised unemployed youth; gender, literacy and basic life skills; financing mechanisms; certification and validation
Summary: This paper presents three challenges in facilitating access to demand-driven technical and vocational training to marginalised youth.
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In recent years, models of skills development and technical and vocational education have moved from a provider-driven training model, where people received training without the assurance that it was aligned to an identified need in the labour market, to a demand-driven one. The need to link training to employment (either self or paid employment) is at the root of all the good practices and strategies documented.
This being said, training initiatives have been mostly targeted at the formal sector of the economy, while vast numbers of youth live in poverty and engage in some economic activity in the informal sector. Today there are still approximately 74 million youths who do not attend either primary or secondary school and are unemployed.
The question is: how can we facilitate access to demand-driven technical and vocational training to marginalized youth?
A first challenge is to identify who are the marginalized unemployed youth. Identifying the sub-groups of vulnerable young women and men who are outside the formal training system and work place, understanding their needs and situation, and linking this analysis to a situational analysis in term of needs in the labour market or the livelihood system seems like our first task.
Gender is, of course, a key factor in doing so. The skill gaps that currently exist worldwide between men and women have resulted from a number of factors including lower literacy rates for women, limited ability of women to travel to training centres, and social factors that put pressure on women to enter training for traditional occupations instead of training that is geared to new demands of the labour market. Men’s and women’s needs with regard to their economic participation also differ. Women require specific support to address the fact that they are responsible for the majority of domestic work when interventions for skills development, training or education are created.
Some conditions have been identified to make technical and vocational programs more welcoming to women: employing female instructors and support staff; facilitating access to child care services; reducing the distance to training program sites; supporting older women who are re-entering the labour market or who have not completed basic education; scheduling non-formal skills for employment (SFE) programs in consultation with women trainees; using culturally-appropriate teaching methodologies; providing segregated and protected dormitories, and adequate sanitary facilities; and ensuring that staff are trained to prevent and respond to sexual harassment and violence .
A second challenge consists in linking literacy and basic life skills to technical and vocational education. For marginalized and out-of-school youth, the lack of literacy and basic life skills limits their life chances, including access to employment and/or technical and vocational training, and restricts opportunities for earning a living, whether in formal or non-formal sectors. Literacy provides the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute. Basic life skills can include, depending on the context, abilities such as cultivating self-confidence, developing the ability to communicate, acquiring discipline, respecting work ethic, developing tools for conflict resolution or decision-making, etc. It can also refer to some basic knowledge in health, including sexual health, child and maternal health; finances, including managing one’s income and drawing up budgets; safety and security; agriculture basic knowledge; etc. They are prerequisite to any vocational or technical training as well as putting that training in action. Other generic management skills that support business development and access to markets are also included, often with a focus on developing entrepreneurship abilities.
A third challenge is to put in place the financing mechanisms that facilitate access to marginalized groups such as youth engaged in subsistence economy. Skills training is very costly, on the average four times more expensive than general secondary education. In many developing countries, state funding is inadequate to meet the high costs of equipment, materials, infrastructure and instructor training needed to offer quality demand-driven TVET programs. There is also a high risk that governments will transfer the cost to the users, thereby increasing student tuition fees. This will de facto limit the access for disadvantaged youth and limit the capacity of families to benefit from skills training program as a means out of poverty. Alternative financing mechanisms and pro-poor policies should be put in place. These may include: a tax levy on payroll. For instance, in Jamaica, the HEART Trust National Training Agency is funded by a 3% tax levy on the payroll paid by employers of SMEs and large companies; Education saving plans offered by banks and credit unions to allow families to save over time for the future cost of tuition fees (with contribution from the state to the savings plans); scholarships for disadvantaged students to cover tuition costs; sliding scale of tuition fees determined according to the family revenue (the poorer the family, the lower are the tuition fees) or others.
There are of course many other considerations. One of these points to the need for prior learning assessment recognition, validation and certification mechanisms for non-formal technical and vocational training. Disadvantaged and marginalized youth often have greater access to non-formal skills training programs offered through apprenticeships and/or by local/international NGOs. The need here is to define quality standards for skills training, provide supervision of non-formal programs (including apprenticeship), provide training and capacity building to reach the standards and certify that those programs meet the required standards ( even if accreditation may not be feasible given that non-formal programs are generally not provided by established institutions). To break the cycle of disadvantage, poor youth need to access quality training and receive official certification for the training received and completed. This will facilitate their integration in the formal labour market and life-long learning.
Note: this short paper is adapted from comments addressed to the GMR team in their online consultation on skills development for the 2012 GMR.
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Cite article as: Bessette, G., (2011) ‘Skills for the Marginalized Youth: Breaking the Marginalization Cycle with Skills Development’, in NORRAG NEWS, Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark, No.46, September 2011, pp. 66-68, available: http://www.norrag.org
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