Development cooperation and vocational training: what about the capacity of the local labor market to integrate training beneficiaries?

I recently worked with an association in the Great Lakes region on its project to help young people with disabilities, who had been trained by the association, find employment.
​
​In this context, the difficulties encountered echoed situations that are quite common when a vocational training project is implemented to fight unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa.

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.

Let us return to the situation of the Great Lakes mentioned earlier which, although it constitutes a particular case given the beneficiaries concerned, does not seem any less interesting to mention.
 
Eager to move forward with this project to integrate young people with disabilities, some members of the association considered the lights to now be "green." Indeed, the authorities said they were ready to support this fragile part of the population: opportunities seemed to be available for those who wished to integrate professionally.

This justified, on my side, pondering on "how to accompany towards insertion" in this case. And this began with the collection of information on young people who had recently completed their training in order to get to know them better and to evaluate whether they would be able to hold a job of a simple activity, a few hours a week, in autonomy.
 
However, at the end of this collection, a worrying finding emerged since the 20 "targeted" young people had certainly acquired "usable" skills, but none of them were autonomous: accompanying adults, therefore, had to be considered to facilitate both the travel of these young people and, in all likelihood, the supervision of their activities.

Within the association itself, the observations made led to a rethinking of the final objectives of the training center. The gradual discovery of the profile of the young people leaving the center, but also the parental feedback as to the form that the professional integration of their children should take, pointed more towards the establishment of a sheltered workshop close to the family home of the young people leaving. This was a perfectly logical option, given the young people involved, and one that was now shared by all the project leaders. But it cancelled - at least temporarily - the effective observation of the integration into the labor market of young people from this center, with regard to certain facilities provided by the authorities. ​However, this option could be reconsidered in the futur, in the case of more independent youth.

For my part, the project of accompaniment towards integration as initially envisaged had to be abandoned in favor of options more suited to the young people trained at the center.

However, the extension of the reflection on this "adventure" has again brought to light the importance of evaluating the capacity of a market to integrate the beneficiaries of a development project who, after having benefited from professional training, wish to access a salaried position.

This assessment is all the more important since requests for vocational training from local partners to solve unemployment problems are common.
​While it is obvious that access to vocational training is essential for anyone wishing to sell "job" skills to an employer, it is also necessary that the economic market into which a trained individual wishes to enter be able to integrate him or her at the end of the training. If this is not the case, it means that vocational training is not the solution to unemployment for young people seeking paid employment.

Of course, the ability to integrate the trained youth into the local job market is more the responsibility of the community from which they come—and, in particular, its elected officials—than of the NGO making the training available.
 
However, it seems essential to consider consultation on this issue with local elected officials before an intervention is launched.
In order for them - together with the key actors of the local economic market (and in particular, employers) - to determine whether, how and to what extent the labor market can absorb those who have recently completed training. Or share their analysis of the root of the prevailing unemployment situation.
 
Clearly, this is a process that is far from having the methodology and impact of an approach such as LED (Local Economic Development) or other similar approaches. But it has already proven to be useful in facilitating the integration of trained youth, and it raises awareness among the local elite of a recurring problem that requires their support.

So that the integration prospects of young people leaving training are strengthened, and that they do not have to be content with resorting to odd jobs and being satisfied with earning "un peu, un peu " ...
 
​
Catherine Ukelo, February 2023

​Do you want to benefit from future articles ? Subscribe to the Newsletter   !