Poverty. Growth and Training Development
in Latin America and Caribbean Countries

The history of any social institution always admits more than one reading. Vocational training in Latin American and the Caribbean is no exception, and it has been approached and described from very different angles.

From an economic point of view there is a generalised consensus in linking the movement of creation of national vocational training institutions (VTIs) to a particular international juncture. This resulted in the adoption of a development strategy defined as "inward looking", i.e. encouraging the emergence of a national production with greater added value, basically destined to the domestic market and imports substitution. This in turn posed the challenge of getting the skilled and semi-skilled human resources that the incipient productive systems of the various countries required, which found a solution in the creation of public or state bodies that tackled the task of training manpower at national level.

There is still, however, one other interpretation more closely connected to a social view of things, in which institutionalised vocational training appears as a complement and reinforcement of the efforts in education and literacy that took place in the region at the same time.

In many of our countries, the old formal education systems were unable to cope with at least two important aspects: firstly, to make effective the universal coverage they aimed at, especially regarding the more disadvantaged population groups; and secondly, linking their contents more closely and effectively with the productive and labour reality that had started to evolve.

From an economic viewpoint, the so-called Vocational Training Institutions (VTIs) were able to meet successfully the demand for qualified and semi-qualified personnel that the imports’ substitution strategy imposed.

From a social point of view, VTIs played a leading role in the literacy campaigns of several countries, and also made an important contribution to look after young people that were not included in the regular education system, through apprenticeship schemes and the implementation of numerous "preliminary levelling" courses.

The subsequent "release" of resources intended for elementary education programmes, due to a considerable extent to the substantial improvement in the levels of schooling of the population at large, did not necessarily mean that VTIs paid less attention to disfavoured sectors. Quite the contrary, it implied a gradual and better focalisation of their programmes, aiming at aspects more closely related to their specific and original purpose, namely, training for productive work.

The stress to which VTIs were submitted after their creation, and the fact that during almost four decades the most significant training action took place within their scope, undoubtedly contributed to give them very special characteristics, as they were simultaneously inserted in the spheres of economy, production, industry and social policy. However, current circumstances seem to have brought about – among other changes – an increasingly blurred demarcation between these spheres of public policy, which also implies new orientations for vocational training.

Social and economic exclusion phenomena, that can be seen through an increase of unemployment and underemployment and informal activities have, among other effects, that of undermining the very competitiveness of the countries’ economic, productive and industrial policies, as well as endangering their social balance. In this new approach, remedial or assistance strategies, excessively local and disconnected from national drives to bolster competitiveness, invest in science and technology and upgrade people’s skills, turn out to be sterile.

The preceding reasoning leads quite naturally to the conclusion that efforts to bring together integration and social justice imply a greater degree of co-ordination among organisations operating in the different areas of public policy. Nevertheless, the task does not end there. Current times are characterised by a much more active participation by private and social players in the most diverse fields. This necessarily means developing alliances and joint action schemes, involving not only public sector bodies but also firms and enterprises, workers organisations and civil society organisations. Training is a particularly favourable field to make progress on that front, which is clearly reflected in the new institutional forms that have been emerging in it.

Box: Costa Rica: the Public Workshop of INA

(Table of contents)   (Foreword)  (Vocational Training: between productive policies And a social policy)  (Changes in socio-economic geography and their equivalent in the institutionality of vocational training)   (Competing paradigms?)  (Implications of Institutional Transformations for the Vocational Training Players)  (Training and poverty: Outstanding features of the most innovative experiences)  (Lessons Learned)

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