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

Despite the difficulty of arriving at a regional balance sheet of progress in the realm of vocational training for sectors in a poverty situation, it is possible, albeit in a general manner, to establish which are the outstanding features of the innovative experiences that have produced the most encouraging results. Those features are not, moreover, the exclusive patrimony of a certain type of institutional arrangement. Very much to the contrary, they tend to identify with the existence of arenas of co-operation and institutional linkage and of concurrence of interests and resources both public and private.

The first distinctive feature is that the purpose of training for these sectors is understood to be training for productive work and for social development. That is to say that it must contribute to facilitate labour-productive insertion by its target population, in such a way that - besides offering immediate opportunities of employment and income - it contributes to the general development of the productive apparatus, at the same time as it helps processes of change that lead to overcoming its constraints, imbalances and inequities and, therefore, to eliminating the structural determinations that place these sectors and groups in a situation of disadvantage.

In the second place, these experiences assume that the only way to contribute to such a purpose is through a pedagogy that considers the members of the target population to be active subjects that are participants in and responsible for their own development, and capable of understanding the socio-economic processes in which they are involved. Training for work and development favours teaching-learning processes that focus on individuals, preferably in collective contexts, that develop their creativity and allow them to administer consciously their learning process adapting it to their own pace and their particular interests. This type of training is recognised, in turn, as part of the open and ongoing education processes and therefore seeks to foresee the best way to dovetail with other methods of education in order to complement and strengthen itself.

Thirdly, it has been found that the traditional notion of teacher-instructor has been overcome, to be supplanted by the broad concept of training agents. Thus the training process is involved with advisors on firm management, technical assistants, development agents from other institutions participating in integrated processes, community multipliers, inter alia. The collective configuration of the training agents, as an interdisciplinary team that intervenes encouraging, supporting, guiding and controlling the training process, contributes to facilitating the progressive autonomy of the target populations and to developing an interest in the subjects of co-operation and management. This configuration, despite it being open to dovetailing with new agents in different phases of the training process, is not left to chance but rather is based on careful selection and training processes and on work techniques by projects.

Fourth, programming of training for work and development is of a functional nature. It is constructed starting with the identification of the problems and critical scarcities in the forms of work and management used, and of the design of profiles improved by the incorporation of adequate technology. That is to say, the functional nature tends to assure the capacity of training response to problems that are real and felt by the target population.

Box: Chile: National inter-institutional policy with gender slant and focalisation

In the fifth place, training seeks to be integral, projective and flexible.

Integral, since its contents not only include goods and services production technologies, but also place particular stress on the development and orchestration of productive and entrepreneurial management capacity. All of it is supplemented with contents referring to the social and economic contexts that frame and determine the labour-productive insertion of these groups. This configuration demands, moreover, that the programming also be integral in terms of foresight and organisation, around the ability and skills development processes, regarding the processes of development of knowledge and of attitudes and values.

It is projective, to the extent that starting from the level of the immediate set of technical problems faced by the target population, or the immediate needs for subsistence production, they are capable of offering development possibilities to those who wish or need to supplement and deepen their training to access more demanding levels of technology and management. Among other effects, this definition has led to linking with external systems such as those of basic non-school education, those of popular education, etc., seeking to help provide the target populations with possibilities of access to basic training in notions of mathematics, reading and writing capacity, as well as to the development of abilities of expression and of handling of formal processes and of institutional environments.

Finally, flexibility refers to seeking the versatility necessary to adapt to a wide range of economic, social, technological and cultural situations of the target population and its methods of production. This flexibility, that presumes a diversity of content and training levels, is orchestrated through the modular organisation of programming, the only way to allow combinations and variations in the training processes, while maintaining control over them and ensuring strategies that are integral and projective.

In the last but not least place, these experiences combine three operational functions in their strategies of action: training, promotion and advice.

Training is addressed to raising the levels of competence of individuals for performance of the work related to the process of production of certain goods and services, for the management of the same process and for the tasks involving their own welfare and development. The training techniques not only include the traditional ones requiring presence (not because of that are they less valid) such as courses, workshops, seminars, etc., but also those which have been developed more recently, such as self-training techniques.

Promotion addresses the social integration of a population which is initially dispersed and its mobilisation around a development alternative, as well as the maintenance of cohesion regarding the accumulation of internal and external pressures that will affect it inevitably throughout the training process. The most frequently used techniques within the promotion function are: participative research-action, pedagogical publicity, recovery of the oral tradition, organisational laboratories, training encounters and tours, etc.

The advisory function seeks to provide access to socio-economic and technological information that broadens the ever restricted panorama of training, due to its necessarily specific nature. It includes entrepreneurial advice or management advice and technical assistance addressed to helping to face the technical problems that - due to their urgency or level of complexity and specialisation - are out of reach or of the immediate possibilities of the target population, or cannot wait for the results of the training and must be solved "from the outside" by specialists. The advisory programmes are organised normally on the basis of the following types of events or lines of action: technological and socio-economic information, extension campaigns, training consultancies, technical assistance, social-entrepreneurial advice, inter alia.

(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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