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The transition to more just and sustainable development requires radical change across a wide range of areas and particularly within the nexus between learning and work.
This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training that goes beyond the narrow focus of much of the current literature and policy debate. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this issue through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods. Crucially, it explores learning that takes place informally online, within farmers’ groups, and in public and private educational institutions.
Offering new insights and ways of thinking about this field, the book draws out clear implications for theory, policy and practice in Africa and beyond.
region, both public and private, the latter typically religious. Complementing these is a vast array of nonformal training programmes and a large informal sector with young people learning through apprenticeships at small businesses, in NGO programmes, on YouTube, and from each other. Compounded exclusion: war, gender and disability We have stressed human agency and community wellbeing, but it is vital also to note the compounded social exclusion faced by women and people with disabilities. Monk et al (2021 a) have documented significant gendered oppression of
manufacturing. Such areas were never particularly economically viable as small-scale farming regions (also because of poor infrastructural support by the apartheid government) and were always dependent on transfer payments from migrant workers under colonialism and apartheid. This migration and remittance culture endured the transition to democracy in 1994. Today, state expenditure, public sector employment and monthly social grant payments (for children, the elderly and those with disabilities) constitute three further pillars of the financial economy. Public sector
, 1989 ). However, we need to be cautious about the inclusivity of either colonial or modern forms. In much of Africa, they have been relatively small in scale and scarcely better at reaching the mass of youth than more formal modes of vocational learning. Moreover, although it is often seen as a space for learning opportunities of those with limited formal education, we need to remember that educational levels are actually quite varied ( Alla-Mensah, 2021 ), and that it is also a site of exclusion on grounds of gender, ethnicity, disability and so on. While there are
in climate adaptation. Lack of access to productive land, water, energy and safe housing means that poor communities have lower adaptive capacities and are particularly vulnerable. Vulnerability is the propensity to be adversely affected, including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt ( DEFF, 2019 ). Vulnerable groups can be identified by factors such as gender, age, disabilities, household income and reliance on public-sector services. Social and economic development including access to basic services are the starting point
concentrated). Workers already in these labour markets largely retain the ability to positively cope with their transitions. However, those who can’t access them are unlikely to have easy and positive transitions. This is not simply a matter of chance but hugely shaped by factors such as gender, race, ethnicity and disability. Sawchuk and Taylor describe their approach as ‘critical vocationalism’. They critique the vocationalist orthodoxy that workers need to be adapted to the needs of the economy (see our comments on human capital theory in Chapters 1 – 3 ). They argue
