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

Something that can be verified in any one of the countries of the region is that the institutionality of vocational training has changed substantially. This means to say that VTIs are no longer the only actors to be considered, insofar as – even when they retain considerable weight on the training scene – they have lost their former hegemony, in other words, they are not any more the guides that monopolise the supply of training programmes in their countries. Side by side with them there are nowadays training systems built round the activities of Labour Ministries. Also to be noted is a much more active role played by firms and their corporate organisations, as well as by trade unions. The private, non-governmental training offer is constantly growing and becoming consolidated.

These changes in the institutional nature of vocational training also lend themselves to more than one interpretation regarding cause and effect relationships, (as did the origin itself f vocational institutes). On the one hand, processes of greater economic openness, with their consequent exposure to the conditions of international trade, plus diminished State intervention, have forced firms and enterprises to redefine their trade strategies. Domestic markets are no longer "captive" domains, and very often a firm’s survival depends on its capacity to conquer markets in other countries. Consumer preferences and changes in taste become fundamental guidelines for the organisation of production, which grows much more flexible and varied, as opposed to the mass production and repetitiveness of previous decades. The rate of technological innovation has accelerated and caused a deep mutation in the organisation of labour. In this new scenario, the relative importance of the knowledge factor in production has increased remarkably, awakening a renewed interest of employers in the subjects of vocational education and training.

This boom of vocational training in corporate circles has resulted both in an expansion of in-plant training and personnel development plans, a much more active participation by employers in VTIs, and in the creation of training bodies managed by corporate organisations. But above all, a greater demand for training has become apparent, which encourages the development of private offers through a large number of institutes, academies and training centres.

The overwhelming importance acquired by knowledge – and in consequence by training – within productive processes and strategies to improve competitiveness, has become evident in labour relations systems. The ties of training with areas such as wages, labour security, working conditions and environment, occupational careers and quality inevitably make it an object of negotiation, and a focal point in the attention of employers, workers and their respective organisations.

Evidence of the above is the more active participation of trade unions in the life of VTIs, the increasing number of collective agreements that include training provisions, and the expansion of labour legislation on the subject. Equally significant are the independent experiences in training of labour unions, bipartite and tripartite management of training, and the participation of unions as executing agencies of public training and employment policies.

Activities in the public sector are at present much more diversified than before. Specifically, Ministries of Labour have become leading players in training. They do not act as direct executing agents – a role taken over in all cases by private and/or non-governmental bodies – but as managers of systems, encouraging both the demand and supply sides of training. They may be unilateral or tripartite administrators, as well as generators of training programmes for disadvantaged groups (young people, women that head households, micro-enterprises, ethnic minorities, unemployed workers, etc.).

Box: Uruguay: Youth Training and Employment Programmes

Simultaneously and concurrently with the changes in the commercial sphere, as well as in the organisation of work and production, technology and labour relations, deep social transformations have also taken place. In the "modernising" approach in vogue more than two decades ago, poverty was seen as a phenomenon denoting the "backwardness" of certain social groups in connection with the goals pursued by society concerning economic, social and cultural progress. Such goals were reasonably conceived as embracing the whole nation. Therefore, the objective of social policies was to make available to all the population, through universal coverage, the resources and mechanisms to extend "modernisation" to all strata, regions and productive sectors.

Awareness of the existence of chronic poverty cores, subsisting through generations and "immune" to any battery of public policies, led to rethinking the situation. Criteria of focalisation, the development of special methodologies and institutional designs were adopted. However, the current complexity and scope of the "social question" does not stop there. Unemployment, which historically had been a cyclic and circumstantial phenomenon, that appeared in economic recessions and was only marginal in growth stages, became an independent variable. Structural and chronic unemployment came on the scene. In an increasingly larger portion of unemployment statistics, it has become alarmingly persistent. Indications then are that there is a growing number of permanently unemployed persons.

In turn, the development of the informal sector of the economy in countries of the region appears as a crucial problem in this end of century. Although not strictly and conceptually equivalent to poverty, this tendency is in fact closely associated with it. A variegated mosaic often permeated by the formal sector, informality encompasses various forms of economic activity that in most cases employ poverty stricken groups: low productivity micro-enterprises, self employed individuals, non-registered personal services, and so forth.

A better understanding of the problem of poverty has uncovered its multiple causes and the diversity of concrete situations that underlie statistical figures. Aspects such as age, gender and ethnic origin are not only associated with poverty but reinforce social exclusion.

If, as indicated earlier, besides its productive and economic role vocational training always played a clear-cut social part, providing an educational offer for disfavoured groups, this challenge has nowadays a greater complexity that necessarily implies institutional changes.

Since VTIs were the main tool of public policy in the field of occupational training for disadvantaged sectors – at least until the ‘seventies - the social and economic changes that have occurred since then and better knowledge of existing problems have revealed their shortcomings in at lest two areas:

• Insufficient coverage, even in the case of VTIs with large infrastructure and personnel, regarding aspects affecting considerable sectors of society.
• Lack of flexibility and diversity in their training response to heterogeneous situations (chronic poverty, young people looking for a job for the first time, micro-enterprises in the formal and informal sectors, workers displaced from work posts, women heading households, migrants and persons displaced by armed conflicts, etc.)

But it would be historically inaccurate to say that the mere consideration of this kind of shortcoming resulted in the succession of institutional changes that occurred subsequently. The truth is that such changes in the institutionality of vocational training were also –and mainly – the upshot of what was going on in other areas of public policy. In the same way as the State had played a leading role in the economic sphere – either through measures to protect domestic production, by means of tariff barriers or acting directly as an entrepreneur – public policies were entirely developed as an eminently State responsibility.

In that respect, the vocational training policies implemented through VTIs were no exception to the rule, in times when health, housing, social security and education policies were planned, designed and implemented by public departments or ministries.

The new approaches adopted since the mid-seventies by most countries of the region introduced a significant change in the role of the State both in economic matters and social policies. Public works in infrastructure and housing were increasingly implemented through tenders and concessions to private capital. Public utilities in telecommunications, electric power or insurance were privatised in many cases. And regarding social policy, new models emerged in which the State played a subsidiary role, setting the "rules of the game", managing and financing without directly undertaking execution, and outsourcing even monitoring and evaluation tasks.

It is in this framework that the institutional nature of training began to evolve, torn between its commitment to economy and production and its role in social policies. Training and employment programmes for the young are particularly revealing in connection with such transformations. They started with the Chilean experience of a programme called "Chile Joven", and extended quite rapidly to other countries of the region. Through a specialised service attached to the Labour Ministry (the National Training and Employment Service – SENCE -) the Chilean State introduced a new type of social policy quite different from previous ones. Until then, such policies had tried to be "universal" (including all people that shared some very general characteristics), but the new programmes or projects focused on very specific population groups. Whilst in the past training policies had been implemented from beginning to end within some public body or organisation, in the new approach the State – usually through specialised units or services dependent on Labour Ministries – defines the main components and characteristics of the projects, finances and manages them, leaving implementation to private or non-governmental agents that bid for such task.

This change in the way of carrying out social policies through training – as well as in meeting the needs of the productive sector – has been described as a shift from a "supply side" approach to a "demand side" one. Which means that while in the past there was a rigid, predetermined supply of courses from which young candidates, workers or firms had to choose, the new process consists of, first of all, fine-tuning the mechanisms to "read" existing requirements, and then designing training responses as close as possible to the characteristics and needs of the target population.

Finally, a new and undoubtedly beneficial aspect of this new generation of social policies in training has been a much greater emphasis on evaluation procedures. During quite some time, evaluation in vocational training circles was a mere enumeration of actions carried out, number of trainees recruited, number of graduates or average hours of tuition per student. Nowadays the "common sense" of training projects, programmes and policies dictates that a basic aspect of evaluation has to be their degree of success in providing job outlets, as well as ensuring subsequent occupational careers.

Box: Argentina: Occupational Workshops’ Programme

(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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