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

The purpose of the present paper is to outline the changes undergone by the institutionality of vocational training in the last few decades, in consequence of its historical calling of contributing to social integration and equity. It also tries to sketch out the various alternatives of social policies in training that have been experienced in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Although the commitment of vocational training with sectors afflicted by poverty has been a long-standing challenge, it has not ceased to be complex. Perhaps one of its most difficult aspects is that training has always been torn between the modern and the traditional, faced with the dual needs of responding to productivity, competitiveness and quality but also providing education for productive work for the neediest sectors of society.

Even at times of great fragmentation of public policies, vocational training always remained as one of the few threads that joined together economic growth and modernisation with national aspirations of social development in an all-embracing, integrating sense.

Historic confirmation of the above is the role played by Vocational Training Institutions (VTIs) of the region. In the beginning, nearly all of them made important efforts aimed, on the one hand, at giving priority attention to young people that had not joined the regular education system; they did so through apprenticeship schemes. Furthermore, the first institutions that emerged in the region had the express purpose of structuring such apprenticeship, that so far had only been dispensed in a ready-made fashion in some branches of expanding industries.

In the first few years, the shortcomings of regular education systems compelled VTIs to deliver introductory "levelling" courses, in order to impart elementary skills in reading and writing and mathematics, to give candidates the rudiments required to profit from their training courses. Very often VTIs carried out literacy and adult education campaigns, either on their own or joining forces with Ministries of Education.

As recently as some ten years ago, social policies in vocational training could practically be equated with the actions implemented by VTIs. Some countries had already undertaken important changes in the institutionality of vocational training, by means of privatisation processes of the original VTIs, relegating the State to a subsidiary role, at most as a facilitator of training activities that had to be organised according to market rules. That created a gap in those countries in the implementation of social policies in vocational training, which together with the social consequences of adjustment policies, made it necessary to apply correctives.

It was precisely in those corrective or remedial measures that lay the seed of the new approaches to social policies in vocational training, and the institutionality required to sustain them. Most of those policies were organised around Ministries of Labour, which through units or specialised services assumed the task of managing and administering them, delegating the executing function to private social or non-governmental agents. This possibility of managing public funds in a more decentralised and participative manner explains to a great extent the proliferation of new training offers.

The new approaches have had many positive effects. Above all, they paved the way for a critical analysis of the situation of VTIs, and in many cases led to significant processes of institutional transformation. However, the application of different models of social policy in vocational training makes it now possible to draw up a balance sheet and identify critical areas where there are still problems to be solved.

On the one hand, the institutionality developed around Ministries of Labour shows certain signs of policy weakness and it is difficult to control the fragmentation of the training offer it brings about. Although there are exceptions, many programmes pursue immediate goals which may be justified by urgent situations but fail to become reconciled with the sustainable long-term efforts of a lifelong education. Likewise, and simultaneously with the leading role played by Ministries of Labour in training, in various countries Ministries of Education have been withdrawing from conducting training policies and programmes.

On the other and, the shorfalls that became evident in many VTIs regarding a high degree of bureaucratisation, lack of flexibility of their training supply and problems of obsolescent contents in many programmes, are now being countered by encouraging developments. It is precisely within the institutional framework of those VTIs that the most important innovations are taking place to co-ordinate training with innovation, development and the transfer of technology. It is also there that most progress has been made in new technologies and methodologies applied to training programmes. Apart from which they are predominant in the training of trainers and in the adoption of recent novelties regarding management, organisation and technological innovation in the realm of work and production.

This underlies the need to improve current levels of dialogue and co-operation among different institutional areas, and to make closer contacts with the new players that have burst into the training field. Although we are still far from that goal, there have been various concrete experiences that indicate a certain rapprochement and a common ground for learning together. The complexity and vastness of poverty and exclusion phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean leave us no other alternative, since no single actor or institution could cope with the huge challenge of developing and sustaining overall and modern training systems with all the coverage and flexibility they require. Several such experiences are summarised in the boxes included in the text.

The paper consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 refers to the specificity of vocational training, as an area connected simultaneously to the productive/economic sphere and to the social sphere, and the way in which this special circumstance has conditioned its institutional history. Chapter 2 analyses how changes in socio-economic geography have contributed to institutional changes and to the emergence of new approaches regarding social policy in vocational training policies. Chapter 3, in turn, proposes a way out of the discussion as to which are the most appropriate institutional arrangements to wage war against poverty through vocational training. It further considers that the various approaches are not mutually exclusive, it analyses their positive aspects and unresolved problems in order to extol the virtues of greater institutional complementation and integration. Chapter 4 looks into the consequences that the institutional changes currently under way may have for the different leading players on the training scene. Chapter 5 tries to describe in a generic manner the main characteristics of innovative experiences in the struggle against poverty through vocational training. Finally Chapter 6, "Lessons learned", summarises the main conclusions that may so far be drawn regarding the combined effect of the various institutional approaches and arrangements of social policies in vocational training. The paper also includes several boxes illustrating VT programmes, being conducted on the subject of poverty and training, in some countries of the American region.

This paper was specially drafted for the meeting of the Working Group for International Co-operation in Vocational and Technical Skills Development, scheduled for 2 to 3 March 2000 at Washington D.C., United States of America, organised by the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and USAID.

(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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