Despite the lack of evidence, it is widely argued that the impact of public sector training for the poor has been minimal in most countries. Typically, unit training costs are relatively high with small enrolments and low completion rates. The intensive involvement of international experts in many projects has made them especially expensive. In youth training programmes, relatively few trainees have become self-employed. In Nigeria, for example, by the early 1990s, only 2 per cent of the over 100,00 apprentices trained through the government's Open Apprenticeship Scheme had managed to start their own businesses mainly because of the high cost of equipment (see Gallagher and Yunusa, 1996). In Zimbabwe, only three per cent of students graduating from Youth Training Centres in the early 1990s became self-employed (see Bennell, 1992).
There is a broad consensus that while smaller training programmes aimed at groups facing only moderate problems in the labour market have been found to yield positive results, broad and untargeted interventions have been universally ineffective.
5.3.1 School-based VET There are widespread concerns among educationalists and education economists, especially in the donor community about the efficiency and effectiveness of specialised school-based VET. However, the political appeal of this type of training provision endures. With the chronic lack of institutional capacity to provide post-school VET coupled with pervasive concerns that formal schooling is too academic and engenders 'inappropriate attitudes', it appears quite sensible and rational to try to impart key vocational skills while children are in school.
Table 3 shows that secondary technical schools account for a very sizeable proportion of total enrolments in secondary schools in Latin America and Asia and that this share continues to increase in the majority of countries. Despite claims by the World Bank and others that technical secondary schools are both relatively inefficient and ineffective compared with academic schools, the rates of return evidence, certainly in South America and Asia, does not bear this out (see Bennell, 1995). The impact of these schools on poverty reduction is, however, much less clear. Little or no research has been undertaken on the socio-economic background of students and the absolute and relative impacts of this type of education on individual and household welfare. Although it is frequently asserted that this type of education is particularly beneficial for students from poorer backgrounds, in many countries, a disproportionate number of students are from non-poor groups and relatively few graduates end up in training-related jobs in either the formal or informal sectors. Furthermore, with respect to gender, there appears little evidence to show that girls have managed to make major in-roads into traditionally male-dominated manual trades at these schools.
EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING PAPERS 43 Learning to change: Skills development among the economically vulnerable and socially excluded in developing countries Paul Bennell Employment and Training Department International Labour Office Geneva First published 1999
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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