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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.
Begging is widely condemned, but little understood. It is increasingly visible, yet politically controversial. Recent changes in British social security, housing and mental health provision can be seen to have exacerbated the extent of begging in the UK, and its persistence is an indictment of the failures of social policy throughout the Western world.
Though begging is intimately linked to issues of street homelessness, mental health, substance abuse and social exclusion, this book specifically focuses on begging as a distinctive form of marginalised economic activity.
It looks at:
the significance of face-to-face contact between beggars and passers-by; the preoccupation with the classification of beggars; the stigma associated with begging and judgements required by the passer-by; the place of begging in the spectrum of informal economic activity.
The book provides a comprehensive overview and will stimulate theoretical, policy and methodological debates, driving forward the research agenda.
It is important reading for researchers, academics and students in social policy, social work, sociology, politics and socio-legal studies, and also for social work practitioners and, particularly, policy makers.
Evan Easton-Calabria’s critical history of refugee self-reliance assistance brings new dimensions to refugee and international development studies.
The promotion of refugee self-reliance is evident today, yet its history remains largely unexplored, with good practices and longstanding issues often missed. Through archival and contemporary evidence, this book documents a century of little-known efforts to foster refugee self-reliance, including the economic, political, and social motives driving this assistance.
With five case studies from Greece, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, and Egypt, the book tracks refugee self-reliance as a malleable concept used to pursue ulterior interests. It reshapes understandings of refugee self-reliance and delivers important messages for contemporary policymaking.
Most slave trades were abolished during the 19th century yet there remain millions of people in slavery today, amongst them approximately 210 million children in slavery, trafficked, in debt bondage and other forms of forced labour. This groundbreaking book, drawing on experience worldwide, shows how children remain locked in slavery, the ways in which they are exploited and how they can be emancipated. Written for policy and political actors, academics and activists, it reminds us also that all are implicated in modern childhood slavery - as consumers - and need both to understand its causes, and act to stop it.
Conventional approaches to vocational education and training (VET) globally are inadequate to meet either present or future needs. They are based on assumptions about VET being inferior to academic education and that only those who cannot get into academic education would pursue vocational learning. They assume that formal vocational learning is the only or main form of vocational learning and that formal VET graduates will transition into formal sector jobs concentrated largely around metals, motors and manufacturing. None of this is true. In Africa, most people are working and learning in informal settings. Many have a powerful vocational impulse. Even many of the poorest are using digital technologies for their learning. Moreover, a focus on skills to produce more is pushing us further and further beyond the boundaries for the safe operating of this planet. In response, this book focuses on social skills ecosystems in which a range of actors come together to negotiate skills needs, including in informal and rural settings and in the production of skills for the maintenance and replenishing of the natural resource nexus. This focus highlights the complexity of interactions in local and horizontal relationships between actor-citizens in a place and the often top-down and disabling actions of states trying to do development to subject-recipients.
was a huge and sophisticated bourgeois city before Communism, and since 1989, has experienced social and residential polarisation closer to those of London or Frankfurt than to nearby cities, such as Bratislava (or even the Hungarian provincial cities). Second, Budapest attracts a high volume of migration from rural Hungary, and has experienced a rapid growth in homelessness since the end of Communism. Whereas rural skills are at a premium in Lvov or Kiev (pauperised former industrial centres), they are of little use in Budapest, a thriving commercial and tourist
socioeconomic services – such as education, training, healthcare, birth registration, job placement services, bank accounts and access to credit – which reduce vulnerability to trafficking. Access to these services is often impeded by the lack of an identity card (Blakeley, 2009). Simple measures, such as providing an identity card to children at risk, may be taken to reduce the vulnerability of potential victims. Also, targeting the socially excluded through programmes that offer rural skills training, micro- finance, business development services and job placement
for their continued care and maintenance’. 25 The study found high levels of unemployment among the refugees despite their participation in a wide range of economic activities. Unemployment was attributed to limited markets, a dearth of suitable tools, and an unavailability of high-quality raw materials for production. The ILO study proposed a variety of projects, including basic vocational and rural skills training, builder’s teams, kitchen gardens, handicrafts marketing, activities to ‘increase the self-reliance of refugee women in fulfilling their basic needs
