Nearly 2 months ago, when I was in the DRC to provide vocational training to local partners, I found myself in a rather surprising situation. It reminded me of another one in Mali, under almost identical conditions, and raised questions about the freedom of expression that our African partners allow themselves – or not – when implementing project activities.
  
Let me describe the Congolese case. 
 
During the training, I wanted to get the audience to agree that it's better to turn to someone with proven skills in a field to obtain the desired service with the desired quality, so I took the rather obvious example of dental treatment. ​The participants all knew I was a psychologist, so I asked them if they would be willing to enlist my services to treat their dental problems. In other words, would they trust me to perform a filling or other dental treatment?

To my great surprise, this question was followed by a 15-second silence: nobody ventured to answer. It was only after this lapse of time that an employee of the NGO I was working for dared to say "No, I wouldn't," after which a few other people responded in kind. Yet it was quite clear that none of them would have had the naivety to come to me with a cavity!

Because while the implementation of a new project is always exciting, the intervention’s long-term effectiveness is my (and everyone else’s) main focus.

​So, while I welcomed with regret the worrying news concerning the region's security (the old term is "circle"), those reporting the positive evolution of several young self-employed people who have been in business for at least two years have been entirely gratifying, with a few “downsides."

In 2020, as I was looking into the educational and professional backgrounds of some young Sahelian women seeking access to vocational training with the aim of getting out of unemployment, I was particularly struck by two cases. 
A year or two earlier, both women had benefited from a 12-month training course in catering and a 10-day introduction to entrepreneurship. However, their professional integration in the restaurant business had been abandoned because "It wasn't working!” Therefore, they wanted to benefit from a new, more "promising" training program.
 
Their cases brought to mind situations I had previously observed many times over the years, not only in Mali but also in many other countries in the sub-region – although I hadn't stopped to analyze them before. Indeed, I had noticed that young people applying for vocational training rarely lacked previous training (or upskilling), and, in many cases, they also had experience of professional integration (albeit often in precarious jobs).

Although self-employment appears to be a solution for some of the participants, not all of them have the capacity, desire, or mindset to engage in it. Those training beneficiaries who do not take up the "self-employment" option will systematically look for salaried positions. 

However, even if vocational training is made available in occupations considered "promising," and interventions are judiciously envisaged by the project designers to accompany towards professional integration young trainees who wish to find a job, there is still a prerequisite to be taken into consideration: the capacity of the local labor market—which must absorb the future trainees—to be able to do so. Otherwise, the expected results will not be achieved.

In June 2021, the interventions carried out by Swisscontact Mali within the framework of an EU-funded project (PROJES) were coming to an end. For 21 months, the NGO had launched training for young beneficiaries and deployed its support system for professional integration through which each of them would pass. Naturally, a great deal of attention was paid to post-training support, with the obvious objective of building the self-confidence of each of the future self-employed.

More than a year and a half later, with the aim of observing the evolution of the young beneficiaries of the project launched in self-employment, several ex-collaborators of the project living near these young people were contacted in order to receive news about them. If the contentment expressed by some parents regarding the professional integration of their child—always important—is clearly a reason for satisfaction, some more interesting observations were, however, raised, especially in Bandiagara (Mopti region). 

Taking advantage of an acquaintance’s recent trip to her native Mali, I drew up a questionnaire that she agreed to submit to several young Malians who considered themselves unemployed and without any real possibility of integrating into the job market, even though they had benefited from one—or more—professional training courses.
Far from wishing to stigmatize these young people, who are representative of many sub-Saharans who wish to escape from precariousness but have not yet succeeded, this article aims to highlight three cases of repeated training and unsuccessful insertion into the labor market that illustrate why access to vocational training is not necessarily the ultimate solution to unemployment. 

The descriptions of each of the "cases" will no doubt seem a little (too) detailed at times, but they nevertheless offer the opportunity to observe very concrete realities.