NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
SKILLS, POVERTY REDUCTION, GROWTH AND EQUITY: THE LESSONS
By Kenneth King and Robert Palmer, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh
Skills and the Developmental State. The macroeconomic and political orientation of the state towards global competitiveness, growth and poverty reduction is likely to be inescapably connected to whether there is a pro-poor training policy. Related to this is the issue that while many developing and impoverished transition countries have poverty reduction strategies, it may well be the case that their primary concern is for growth ? and that the poverty reduction discourse is largely expounded as a means to access international development assistance that is so tied to poverty reduction targets. Indeed, a related aspect that has not been given sufficient attention in the current preoccupation of donors with poverty reduction is the empirical question of whether those countries such as China and others in East and South-East Asia which have so dramatically succeeded in reducing poverty have done so by targeting poverty reduction. As we note in the longer paper, it has been argued that none of the most successful cases of late industrialising countries were focused on poverty. Rather they were focused on an overall development policy framework.Access to skills by the poor ? the challenge of the market. States that have experienced structural adjustment, liberalisation, and marketisation, and are persuaded that the skill development system should be ?demand-driven? will find it extremely difficult to identify a demand for training coming from the poorest sections of society. The slow growth of formal employment opportunities and the high and/or increasing levels of poverty in the developing and impoverished transition countries, especially in rural areas (resulting in a slow growth in the number of people with reliable salaries), means that their economies operate as income-constrained markets, and people?s buying power is weak overall. This restricts not only overall demand for products and services, but reduces the demand for training to improve quality since the market could not purchase better quality, more expensive, goods and services anyway. Furthermore, in developing and impoverished transition countries, the poor are usually engaged in survival enterprises, more concerned with keeping their enterprise afloat, rather than investing in training for long term development.
The continuing challenge of reorienting training to the informal sector and the local economic environment. In both developing and impoverished transition countries, public sector skills providers are largely disconnected with the labour market. Training is largely orientated towards formal sector waged employment, and not geared towards the predominant destination of most graduates ? the small and micro-enterprise (SME) sector, usually in the informal economy. The skills required to successfully start-up and run SMEs (especially in the informal economy) are very different from the types of skills required to work in a formal waged job. Teachers and instructors in most existing training centres do not possess the skills or experience in SMEs to be able to teach students how to operate in this area. Public vocational training providers are notoriously sluggish at responding to labour market demand, and where changes do occur the market has often already moved on.
The methodological challenge of researching skill and poverty. Our analysis of the complexity of poverty and of the politics of poverty reduction suggests that the claim of a connection between a training programme and poverty alleviation needs to be carefully analysed, and the character of the programme?s recipients understood. To what extent the poverty focus is a rhetorical requirement, especially in donor projects, needs to be assessed.
A continuing disconnect between the donor-driven discourse of flexible skills and the legacy of occupation-related skills systems. Developing and impoverished transition countries also find themselves with small, underfunded systems oriented to specific occupational skills, while the donor discourse has moved on to talk of flexible skills for the global knowledge economy. The implications of this new discourse for the existing infrastructure and curricula of VET systems have not been thought through.
From skills development to skills utilization: the role of the enabling environment. The requirement for vocational skills to be utilized in the workplace always appears to be more politically necessary than for academic subjects. Nevertheless, the context of utilization is highly dependent on supportive environments, and these are clearly different in dynamic and less dynamic economies. What can be said with certainty is that the good quality of the education and training environment is a crucial precondition for effective utilization of skills in the wider economic environment.
Social composition of skills systems. Left to the market, skills systems will favour the non-poor. Public sector skills programmes usually exclude the poor, either through direct or opportunity costs or through lack of places in these institutions. Skills programmes that are usually considered pro-poor, such as traditional apprenticeship training, may well not be accessible to the very poor since training fees are usually charged. A rather fundamental question that seems to have been neglected in much of the literature on skills-and-poverty is whether the children of the poor are even to be found in the various types of training provision, whether school-based, post-school, enterprise-based or informal economy-based. There is very little good data on the social composition of skills provision, but the substantial cost of most skills training, including fees for training in the informal sector, would suggest that the children of the poorer families are unlikely to be represented. This perspective suggests that a precondition to discussing whether skills training institutions impact on the poor is to know whether the children of the poor actually reach such post-basic institutions at all. Our working assumption would be that without subsidies, talent scholarships and other incentives, the bright poor may well not even reach their national skills training systems.
For further discussion see: King, K. and Palmer, R. (2006) Skills development and Poverty Reduction: the state of the art, Post-basic education and training working paper no. 7, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.
Available online here.