Livelihood promotion Details

However throughout the 1990s, despite official commitments in many development agencies to Human Resource Development and poverty reduction, funding for training and skills development decreased. Public expenditure on basic education, skills development and training was seriously squeezed in the context of structural adjustment policies and liberalisation. Poverty-targeted assistance was focused on provision of minimalist microfinance. Funding for integrated or complementary non-financial services, including training, substantially decreased. Human Development budgets in major donor agencies focused largely on primary education programmes rather than skills for work. Although a few programmes have been introduced for 'lifelong learning' and ICT these do not reach the very poor. The current market focus on demand-led services, partnership with the private sector and cost-recovery have been important advances on many earlier subsidised programmes in terms of meeting the needs of certain groups of entrepreneurs and employees in a more sustainable and cost-effective manner. However they fail to address the training challenge faced by very low income women and men.

Parallel to these 'mainstream' debates about the best mix of subsidised and market approaches, there have been many small-scale project-level innovations in poverty-targeted training methods and content, particularly in female-targeted projects. These have included:

• Integration of life skills, gender awareness and empowerment into livelihood and entrepreneurship training.
• Participatory methods which focus on participant bottom-up learning rather than top-down 'expert' training and which are accessible to illiterate people.
• Integrated programmes of livelihood development training for very poor and illiterate people with literacy training and programme impact assessment.
• Training as part of a set of poverty-targeted programme strategies including micro-finance, marketing support, organizational strategies and macrolevel advocacy.
• Training targeting different levels of particular economic sectors: employees, outworkers and upstream enterprises as part of an integrated pro-poor sectoral approach in these sectors.

This paper argues that the recent small-scale innovations deserve much greater consideration and funding in any serious and coherent strategy for pro-poor growth. The paper builds on current debates and evidence from a number of donor agencies including ILO, World Bank, DFID and GTZ and also secondary source material from NGOs and the author's own research:

Part 1 provides an overview of current debates and evidence in relation to training and skills development for pro-poor growth and proposes a framework for examining training needs.

Part 2 discusses in detail the poverty impacts and broader implications of the experience of a number of innovative training and skills development programmes.

Part 3 summarises the main conclusions in relation to potential ways forward to improve the content, targeting and institutional framework for training and skills development for poor and very poor women and men.

• document (EN)