Fields of work

Training Delivery Systems responsive to the needs of Informal Sector Workers

In spite of many training innovations and pilot tests, established training policies, systems and methodologies continue to primarily address the skill requirements of formal wage job markets, and to be largely linked to formal, often medium to large, enterprises, concentrated in urban areas and in training centres. Such training is neither affordable to poor and low-income clients, nor accessible to those without basic education and skills and with heavy work loads. Furthermore it is rarely relevant to their needs.

On the other hand, when it exists, training for the poor and informal sector, in many cases, perpetuate low skills, obsolete technologies, traditional and usually unremunerative trades, and job stereotypes. For instance it is not uncommon to find poor women being trained in dressmaking, crocheting, basket weaving, soap making, and food processing.

Major challenges facing skills development for workers in the informal economy are to mainstream their concerns into training policies and systems, to upgrade the practices of non formal training providers, to document and develop training strategies for particular categories of workers outside the formal labour market (e.g. those who are difficult to reach such as home-based workers, workers of micro and family-based enterprises, seasonal workers of construction industry), and to establish sustainable financing mechanisms for training for the poor.

The objectives are i) to improve the capacity to identify training needs in, and to reorient formal training systems towards, the informal sector; and ii) to upgrade grassroots-level training systems and make them more relevant to the needs of informal sector workers and to the challenges of the globalised economy.

During the 2000-01 biennium, the Informal Sector Unit of the InFocus Programme on Investing in Skills, Knowledge and Employability will document case studies to build its knowledge base and analyse how formal and non-formal training delivery systems can better serve the needs of the workers outside the formal labour market.

Such case studies are being launched in China, Belarus, North-western territories of Russia, and Jamaica. Similar case studies are being undertaken in Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) in cooperation with the ILO International Training Centre of Turin; and, in India, in cooperation with UNEVOC.

On the basis of the case studies, a compendium of good examples will be produced for the use of training providers, policy makers and other stakeholders, and disseminated.