1.
Introduction: Skills, poverty and development
The purpose of this state of the art review is to assess what is currently assumed and
believed about the relationship of skills development to poverty reduction, and to
place that in historical perspective. There will be a particular attempt, where possible,
to examine what is known about skills in rural areas. This task is made more complex
by the fact that both ‘skills development’ and ‘poverty reduction’ are neologisms; they
have not been in common parlance for much more than a decade. Arguably, skills
development as a concept does not have much salience yet, and particularly with the
national policy community and with the professional constituencies of vocational and
technical educators.1 Skills development is a term that is more employed by
development agencies, but it is noticeable that many of these agencies no longer
have technical or vocational specialists on their staff. And poverty reduction is also
largely a donor term; indeed it has become a core part of the mandate and vision of
many such agencies as we suggested above. It has been routinised through the
poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP) process, which can be seen as a new kind
of aid conditionality.2
The intention in this review is to suggest insights that may be derived from the wider,
but complex, policy and research literature which may prove helpful for new thinking
about skills development both in the developing and in the poorer transition
economies.
Before we turn to examine the particular relationships between skills and poverty
reduction, we need to locate our task within a wider development context and
discourse. The present attempt to discern a connection between skills and poverty is
part of a much larger targeting of poverty by the donor community. The origins of this
poverty discourse lie in the reactions to the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s
and the need for these to have a human face, and for there to be safety-nets for the
poor. These latter policies led to a full-blown targeting of poverty reduction as the
mandate of development agencies. This was confirmed with the emergence of the
international development targets – the first of these aiming that ‘the proportion of
people living in extreme poverty in developing countries should be reduced by at least
one-half by 2015’ (OECD, 1996: 9). It is worth noting that there was no growth target
set by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, even though it was admitted
that its prime poverty target could not be met without substantial economic growth.2
This international development target was translated into the first of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) at the Millennium Summit of September 2000.
The poverty focus of what may be called the world’s development agenda and its
targeting of minimal goals for social development in primary education, gender
equality, basic health care and family planning have led to a major preoccupation of
the development community with service delivery rather than with growth, productive
capacity, or with wider development policy frameworks (King, 2005d). The
consequence of this targeting of poverty and of minimal standards of social
1 In the International Encyclopedia of Education (1994), there were some 40 articles on the topic of
technical and vocational education and training; only one used the term ‘skills development’ in its title (see
‘Taxonomies of Skill Development’ by Benson, 1994). Today the main English language journals in Europe
covering the world of skills development are The Journal of Vocational Education and Training, The
2
European Journal of Vocational Training, and The Journal of Education and Work. For example, the first
policy document on Kenya which was primarily concerned with a poverty assessment was no earlier than
1996 (Narayan and Nyamweya).
2 ‘This (poverty target) implies significantly increased rates of per capita economic growth. However, growth
rates will vary among countries and we have concluded that a global growth target would be neither feasible
nor useful to the formulation of country strategies’ (OECD, 1996:10).
development has been that, for many donors, basic education alone out of all levels
of education and training was picked out as having a priority role in poverty
reduction.3 We shall return below to look in some detail at the impact of this
international targeting on other levels of education,4 but the dominance of the poverty
discourse amongst donors meant that it became necessary to rationalise and
legitimate other development goals – such as higher education, enterprise
development or skills development – in terms of their close connections to poverty
reduction.
What 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. It has been argued
by Mkandawire (2005) 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. In this connection, it is worth noting that both of the
latest comprehensive international development reports – the UN’s Millennium
Project Report (UN, 2005) and the Commission for Africa (2005) – share the Asian
view that the route out of poverty must follow a path of really major investment in
physical infrastructure, market access, trade and technology policies, holistic
education and capacity development, and the creation of an enabling environment for
the private sector, in both rural and urban areas.
In our own pursuit of the state of the international debate about skills and poverty
reduction, we need therefore to bear the historical emergence of this poverty
discourse in mind. We shall, nevertheless, examine what is currently known about
these skill-and-poverty-reduction relations, but towards the end of our analysis, we
shall return to this very basic initial question of whether in the world’s most successful
cases of poverty reduction, skills development was just one of a series of instruments
for increasing productive capacity, economic growth and employability. But we shall
also need to bear in mind Santosh Mehrotra’s comment that these successful cases
had made a demographic transition early on in the process. This is not the case with
the poorest countries today. In addition, technology was changing much less fast in
the 1950s and 1960s than it is now.5
2. A brief history of approaches to TVET and
skills development and to concepts for
attacking poverty
We look first at the early history of the concepts around skill and then attempt a
periodisation of the changes in policies towards poverty and growth.
When we turn to the more specific conceptual predecessors of skills development -
technical and vocational education and training (TVET), and industrial and agricultural
education – they have had a very controversial history. At different historical periods,
both in colonial regimes and in metropolitan countries, they have been thought to be
3 The OECD DAC document actually claimed a link to growth for universal primary education, but it has
been the assumption about the connection with poverty reduction that has prevailed: ‘The attainment of
basic literacy and numeracy skills has been identified repeatedly as the most significant factor in reducing
poverty and increasing participation by individuals in the economic, political and cultural life of their
societies’ (OECD, 1996: 10).
4 For a wide-ranging critique of international targets in education and training, see King and Rose, 2005.
5 Santosh Mehrotra, communication 7.11.05
particularly relevant to subject peoples and to lower classes respectively and to the
less academic pupils in both contexts (King, 1971; 1991). In one sense, therefore,
these subjects and courses were aimed at the poorer classes and colonised peoples,
not so much to reduce their poverty but to secure for them a necessary but
subordinate future in those particular societies. There was a quite different
perspective on the role of vocational education in the countries of the former Soviet
Union, because of the close ideological link between TVET employment and
production, as Grootings has argued:
The vocational education system was administratively linked to an employment
system which discouraged mobility of all kinds, favoured manual skills over
intellectual ones in terms of payment, based promotions on political rather than
professional criteria… (Grootings, 1994: 6642)
The history of vocational education and training (VET) in what are now called the
transition countries was therefore vastly different from that in the former colonial
countries; nor was the colonial experience of vocational and technical training the
same for the British, Spanish, Portuguese and French empires. For one thing, in the
former Soviet empire, the close link of VET to employment meant that there was a
direct connection to what the World Bank now regards as the main highway from
poverty.6 Indeed, the World Development Report 2005 argues that jobs are the main
source of income for people - and the main pathway out of poverty for the poor
(World Bank, 2004b: 136).
Within the Anglophone tradition, it only needs a reference to three sources, the
Phelps-Stokes Commissions (Jones, 1919; 1924), The School in the Bush (Murray,
1929), and ‘The vocational school fallacy’ (Foster, 1965) to make it clear that there
have indeed been huge controversies surrounding vocational and academic
education right up to independence. We won’t review, except very briefly, the lessons
of these here, but in many ways they anticipated many of the controversies that have
been discussed over the past 25 years. For instance, it is often said there is a
convergence evident between the academic and the vocational in Europe today
(World Bank, 2005a; Raffe, 2003); but as long ago as 1929 it was being argued that
there was a fundamental similarity between good quality vocational and good liberal
education.
Like de Moura Castro today (1999), A. Victor Murray argued that a good quality
vocational education made ‘use of physical means as an approach to the world of
mind and spirit. An education in words alone is necessarily an imperfect education’
(Murray, 1929: 208). And Foster (1965), in one of the most well-known articles in the
history of comparative and international education, argued that it was a fallacy to
think that the aspirations of large numbers of poor rural (and urban) children could be
altered in favour of farming (and staying in the rural areas) by changing the school
curriculum in favour of vocational education. Even though Foster was able
persuasively to show that ‘the idea that children’s vocational aspirations can be
altered by massive changes in curriculum is no more than a piece of folklore with little
empirical justification’ (Foster, 1965: 149), the conviction that a more vocational
curriculum can hugely affect pupils’ orientations to occupation has continued to hold
sway at different times in the agency world and most certainly amongst national
policy-makers up to the present.7
By contrast with these longstanding approaches to different kinds of vocational,
technical and agricultural education and training, which have themselves been
6 Of course, the difficulty of admitting the presence of unemployment in the Soviet Union meant that many
people had jobs which were more notional than real.
7 For a revisiting of Foster’s research on skills, work and aspiration almost 40 years later, see King and Martin, 2002.
changing over time, the newer term, skills development, is much harder to theorise or
tie down satisfactorily for current practitioners of VET reform. On the one hand, the
new term still contains the word ‘skills’; yet often the term is used very generally to
refer to flexible skills, learning to learn, and life skills. It often comes to be used in the
very loose and undefined terminology of ‘skills for the knowledge economy’. What can
be said is that the bulk of the donors who continue to be interested in the concept of
skills development are talking about something more than literacy and numeracy
skills, and certainly more than the term ‘life skills’. There is still a strong sense that
the capacities acquired through skills training or skills development are linked to
particular livelihoods, occupations and work – whether in industry, commerce,
agriculture or micro-enterprise. Accordingly, we shall find in this review that skills
development is increasingly used by donors as the preferred term for what used to be
called TVET or VET; but in the field and at the country level, policy-makers and
employers continue to use the older terminology of vocational, technical and
agricultural education and training.
There is a difference, however, in the kinds of debates that have traditionally been
held about skill, vocation and poverty and some of the assumptions lying behind the
current fascination with the relationship between skills development and poverty
reduction. The former were concerned with the appropriacy, cost, pedagogy and
quality of the vocational and technical curriculum, and especially with its anticipated
links to securing employment. By contrast, some of the thinking and expectations that
are associated with skills development and poverty reduction appear to be driven by
a desire to demonstrate a direct impact on the incomes of poor families by their
children’s participation in vocational, technical, industrial or agricultural programmes.
There is something of a paradox at work here; on the one hand, the new meanings of
skills development should point to programmes that are not occupationally specific.
But the majority of examples in the literature on skills development and poverty
reduction are linked to the older conceptions of vocational and technical skills.
We shall want to argue also that the multidimensional character of poverty means that
an assessment of training impact on income alone will not be satisfactory. Before
turning to some of the modalities for relating skill and poverty, we should examine
what progress has been made over the past decade in understanding the complexity
of both poverty and skill. We shall need later to contrast the detailed elaboration of
poverty’s meanings in the development community with how poverty is actually
viewed by national constituencies. For the moment, however, we sketch a
periodisation of policies relevant to our topic.
In the 1950s and 1960s economic growth and modernisation were seen by many
as the primary means of reducing poverty and improving the quality of life. For
example, the Indian Planning Commission viewed rapid growth as the main
(although not the only) instrument for achieving this objective (World Bank, 1990).
In the 1970s attention shifted to the direct provision of health, nutritional, and
educational services. This was seen as a matter for public policy. The World
Development Report- 1980, using the evidence available at the time, argued that
improvements in the health, education, and nutrition of
the poor were important not only in their own right but also to promote growth in
incomes, including the incomes of the poor (World Bank, 1990).
The 1980s saw another shift in emphasis. Countries, especially in Latin America
and SubSaharan Africa, struggled to adjust after the global recession. The
constraints on public spending tightened. At the same time, many began to
question the effectiveness of public policy, and especially the policy toward the
poor (World Bank, 1990). Structural adjustment policies had been pushed by the
World Bank as a means to tackle economic problems in the developing world.
More attention to the social dimensions of development (‘people-centred’
approaches) began to be seen.
The 1990s saw structural adjustment with a ‘human face’, more of a focus on
developing an ‘enabling environment’ (supporting preconditions for poverty
reduction), with the late 1990s and early 2000s seeing the development of
coherent and comprehensive poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs). As we
noted earlier, the ‘discovery’ of poverty was very much driven by agencies, rather
than national governments.
Box 1 summarises the broad categories that have been used to combat poverty.
Box 1: Broad categories of approach to poverty reduction
reducing international inequities: debt restructuring; financial transfers;
renegotiating terms of trade
boosting national economic growth, and associated production-oriented
approaches (in principle agreed by all agencies though now with almost uniform
rejection of the 1960s blind faith in ‘trickledown’ effects; despite varying degrees
of interest in what should be counted, statistics related with this are
overwhelmingly biased towards the monetised market economy which includes
many functions irrelevant or harmful to the poor)
institutional development (a very broad category associated with the general trend
towards emphasising the ‘enabling environment’, and including the recent
emphasis on ‘social capital’)
basic needs provisioning, ‘social sector’ strengthening (direct provisioning and
indirect influence on public investments in food security, shelter, health, etc.)
social security, and safety-nets (public wealth transfers, social insurance)
structural adjustment (with/without a ‘human face’!)
human capital development (associated with Amartya Sen’s concept of
‘capabilities’ particularly as promoted by the UNDP)
empowerment, social inclusion, participation, rights-based approaches (including
those addressing gender, ethnic, and age-related inequalities)
livelihoods (cross-sectoral approaches associated particularly with the work of
Robert Chambers)
reducing inter-generational inequities (environment)
disaster preparedness and rehabilitation (reducing vulnerability to shocks at
various levels) peace-making and reconciliation
Source: Thin, 1999: 22
3. Understanding the links between skills
development and poverty reduction
3.1 The multidimensional understanding of poverty8
There is nowadays a general consensus that poverty needs to be understood in a
multidimensional manner (World Bank, 1990; 2000b). This understanding goes well
beyond the traditional use of income measures as proxies for poverty (i.e. $1 a day
measure), but sees poverty as related to low achievements in education and health
(World Bank, 2000b: 15). The concept of poverty also includes vulnerability, exposure
to risk and voicelessness/powerlessness (World Bank, 2000b: 15).
This broader conceptualisation of poverty is also important since ‘different aspects of
poverty interact and reinforce one another in important ways’ (World Bank, 2000b:
15). This means, for example, that policies targeted at health do more than improve
well-being, but also improve a person’s potential to earn income (ibid.).
When conceptualising poverty, there is also a need to consider vulnerability (insecurity
and exposure to risk and to occasional periods of poverty), inequality (deprivation
relative to other people), the poverty of categories of people (women, children, older
people, disabled people), and collective poverty (of regions, nations, groups) (cf. Thin,
2004). However, it is important to recognise that poverty is not the same as vulnerability,
nor is it the same as inequality. While poverty and vulnerability overlap, the distinction is
crucial to appreciate ‘the difference between being ‘pro-poor’ and being ‘antipoverty’,
since many people not currently understood as ‘poor’ are vulnerable and may become
poor in the future unless effective preventive measures are taken’ (Thin, 2004: 4).
Further, while ‘poverty is also not the same as inequality… there is considerable
overlap… [since] social dimensions
8 For an overview of the nature and evolution of poverty, see Chapter 1, World Bank, 2000b. For a review
of poverty and poverty reduction literature, see Thin, 1999.