Skilling Youth in the Global South

by

Ketaki Prabha, R. Maithreyi

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0295

Introduction

Situated at the intersection of education and labor, the terrain of skill development offers important insight into wide-ranging concerns in the Global South today. The recent proliferation of international development discourse and national policies on skill-based learning, since the 2000s, follows distinct and sometimes contradictory rationales. These stem from the goal of securing the benefits of decades of universal education toward economic growth and competitiveness in developing countries, while leveraging the labor potential of their large youth populations, enhancing their employability in accordance with industry demands, and securing livelihoods in the face of unemployment. A skill development focus has particularly found resonance within international policies and agendas focused on developing nations in the post-COVID-19 economic recovery context. However, critical scholarship on youth has drawn attention to skilling’s productivist principles, which position youth as human capital, and primarily as cheap labor, to be supplied to expanding economies in the Global South, as well as in Global North contexts with aging populations. This literature draws attention to sociohistorical contexts of economic restructuring, pervasive inequality, weak social protections, poverty, and informality that shape processes of skill acquisition and employment in highly variable and inequitable ways. Skill development, as it is currently structured, has the effect of channeling young people into precarious workforces, serving global private capital but constraining opportunities for socioeconomic mobility for students. Further, the scope for learning technical knowledge under skilling initiatives is diluted through standardized competency frameworks and modular courses, in effect leading to a “deskilling” of workers. Historical research on vocational education that preceded present-day skilling programs notes how these systems were conceptualized as a means to train the masses for industrial work, and, in the case of many of the colonized regions of the Global South, to serve colonial labor regimes and limit opportunities for general higher education. The result has been uneven educational development and access in these regions, and a perceived hierarchy between vocational and general education, with the former occupying an inferior status. Vocational education continued to witness low student enrollments, while the learning of skills for work primarily took place outside the domain of formal education, through informal mechanisms. To address these shortcomings, and help the design of skilling programs that better reflect sociohistorical processes that shape learning and work in the Global South, scholars have argued for closer attention to diverse traditional and informal pathways by which skill acquisition actually takes place, the social relations and institutions that mediate these practices, and the processes by which skills come to be valued as such. In addition to technical skills for different occupations, a newer and arguably more significant component of skilling programs has been “soft skilling.” This involves the learning of socioemotional skills such as enterprise, resilience, and self-management, and rehearsing neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in the face of structural barriers such as class, caste, and gendered power. Literature also notes how the individualized self-management of bodies, appearances, and emotions is accompanied by their increasing commodification, with affective and aesthetic labor seen as key skills for service economies. The commodification of embodied and performed traits occurs in ways that capitalize on gendered, racialized, and classed differentiations, reproducing structures of discrimination and exclusion. For many young people then, the skilling landscape is a site of unmet aspirations of social and economic mobility. At the same time, research demonstrates accounts of youth appropriating lessons and trainings in ways that are unintended in policy but empowering to individuals, especially in enabling contexts of kin and community support. Such contextually grounded accounts help to interrogate both deterministic narratives of the benefits of skills policy and the universalist principles of global development that seek to capitalize on the labor of young people without addressing the significant structural barriers they face, and also offer directions in thinking about alternative models of skilling.

Political Economy of Skilling

From a policy perspective, for many countries in the Global South, investments in skilling have become imperative in the context of economic productivity, unemployment, and the failure of the general education system in addressing these challenges. This is reflected in numerous reports and policy briefs by multilateral organizations and financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, and UN institutions, among others, and their skill development partnerships with national governments. Central to this agenda is the training of the “youth bulge” in most Global South nations to harness their productive capacities, with a focus on imparting skills as per industrial demand and keeping pace with the changing nature of work that require digital skills, green skills, and soft skills alongside foundational skills for work. New skilling infrastructures are expected to foster employability, entrepreneurship, and innovation; enhance productivity and competitiveness; and address problems of unemployment and poverty in these regions. Critical scholarship, on the other hand, has questioned some of the assumptions that drive this dominant approach to skilling. King 2009 and McGrath 2012 draw on the policy landscape in India and South Africa, respectively, to highlight the role of international development discourses and aid funding in shaping the skills agenda and its emphasis on market-based reform to restructure training provisions. McGrath 2012 notes how an international VET (vocational education and training) “toolkit” has served as the international norm for restructuring VET since the 2010s, primarily organized around giving more autonomy to employers and industries to determine the landscape of training, alongside promoting outcome-based learning through standardized competency and quality assurance frameworks. King 2012 and Allais 2012 note further how this policy regime is positioned to cater to employer needs, through discourses of skill “shortages” among learners and workers and the enlisting of private capital to bridge the “skill gap.” Adely, et al. 2021 draws on insights from the Arab world to critique this “skills mismatch” discourse, noting that it overlooks the more pervasive effects of global economic restructuring on poor educational and employment outcomes in the Global South. Allais 2012 notes one of the major shifts in skills curriculum has been the introduction of competency-based qualification frameworks, with task-based bundles of skills rather than systematic acquisition of technical knowledge that might be relevant to specific occupations. While borrowed from Global North models of vocational education that have links to regulated occupational markets, these do not account for the largely informal and unregulated labor markets of developing countries, and work to produce fragmented, low-level skills. While King 2012 questions the relevance of the new skilling paradigm against a long-standing history of industries having profitable apprenticeship systems in place that provide on-the-job training to new workers, Saraf 2016 and Ruthven 2018 demonstrate its more insidious benefits to industries. They show how weak skill-based provisioning that prioritizes short-term courses and government targets, and is implemented in the context of highly inequitable educational access, streamlines educationally marginalized students into the lowest tiers of formal sector industries. Undermining the purported goal of skilling, then, this model serves to channel young and effectively unskilled or low-skill workers into low-wage work, while sustaining the reproduction of a casualized and disciplined workforce. Allais 2012, Brown 2022, and Brown and De Neve 2024 argue for more attention to social and economic contexts specific to the Global South in designing skill development, while McGrath 2012a suggests a move away from narrow human-capital theories of productivism toward human-centered development. Balagopalan and Prabha 2024 offers feminist social reproduction theory as a lens to consider the relationship between commodified labor and social relations, and how this (re)produces distinct modalities of skilling in India. McGrath and Yamada 2023 provides an overview of the literature on vocational education and training in the last decade, emphasizing pluralistic theoretical scholarship that better reflects Global South realities, including those that combine traditional political economy with critical realist and grounded approaches to skilling.

• Adely, F. I. J., A. Mitra, M. Mohamed, and A. Shaham. “Poor education, unemployment and the promise of skills: The hegemony of the ‘skills mismatch’ discourse.” International Journal of Educational Development 82 (2021): 102381.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102381

  Conducts discourse analysis of reports by multilateral agencies to note how the dominance of the “skills mismatch” discourse in the Arab World does not account for the effects of structural barriers to education and employment in these countries, and regional differences across the Middle East and North African countries, while also producing an orientalist discourse of these regions as lacking appropriate educational cultures for skilling due to tradition and religion. Offers a detailed case study of Jordan to unpack these factors.

• Allais, Stephanie. “Will Skills Save Us? Rethinking the Relationships between Vocational Education, Skills Development Policies, and Social Policy in South Africa.” International Journal of Educational Development 325 (2012): 632–642.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2012.01.001

  Writing about South Africa, this paper notes how skill development policy has come to be narrowly defined toward employability through a regime of “self-help” competency frameworks and market-oriented reform. With implications for developing economies more broadly, it argues instead for an understanding of vocational education with stronger curricular foundations, and that this is better integrated into social contexts in order to address inequality, job insecurity, and unregulated markets.

• Balagopalan, Sarada, and Ketaki Prabha “Skilling Educated Youth for Insecure Employment in the Informal Economy.” In Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development. Edited by T. Abebe, A. Dar, and K. Wells, 455–469. London: Routledge, 2024.

  Discusses transnational discourses of skilling policy, and their contradictory rationales of productivity and mobility, examining them in the context of India’s skilling ecosystem. The authors explore how youth in India navigate informality and aspiration, highlighting the need for attention to the historical and social factors, in particular class, caste, and gendered exclusions, that mediate learning and work for young people.

• Brown, Trent. “Skill Ecosystems in the Global South: Informality, Inequality, and Community Setting.” Geoforum 132 (2022): 10–19.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.03.019

  Through an exploration of agricultural skills training in two states of North India, this paper argues for attention to social and institutional contexts in understanding the skill development programs. In particular, the author notes the significance of attending to the informal sector where much of skill utilization occurs, the role of families and communities in supporting skill acquisition, and the role of social capital in shaping outcomes.

• Brown, Trent, and Geert De Neve. “Skills, Training and Development: An Introduction to the Social Life of Skills in the Global South.” Third World Quarterly 45 (2024): 607–623.

  DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2023.2219615

  An introduction to a special issue on skills in the Global South that draws attention to the many processes that shape skill acquisition and work outside formal mechanisms, such as informal sites of training, regional political-economies, and meaning-making around skills, identities, and aspirations. Also see Practices of Skill Acquisition for an elaboration on the social life of skills.

• King, Kenneth. “Education, Skills, Sustainability and Growth: Complex Relations.” International Journal of Educational Development 29.2 (2009): 175–181.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2008.09.012

  With the re-emergence of technical and vocational skills development since the turn of the millennium, this paper explores the connections between education and skills to financial sustainability, and interrogates how goals for sustainable development might account for aid-dependency in developing nations.

• King, Kenneth. “The Geopolitics and Meanings of India’s Massive Skills Development Ambitions.” International Journal of Educational Development 32.5 (2012): 665–673.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2012.02.001

  Points to the vast informal economy of India and its system of apprenticeship on-the-job skills training, which preceded the new skills paradigm, and argues that this system was already “demand” driven from the employer’s perspective. Argues that new skilling frameworks do not attend to these histories and practices of skilling pedagogy already in place, or to the low status accorded to vocational training, and instead only rebrands it for the purpose of corporate funding and technical manpower planning.

• McGrath, Simon. “Vocational Education and Training for Development: a policy in need of a theory?” International Journal of Educational Development 32.5 (2012): 623–631.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2012.04.003

  Adopting a broad view of vocational education and skills as a system of practices and technologies, the paper critiques both the economic productivist assumptions that underpin thinking about vocational education and the academic literature that critiques them on these grounds. The paper seeks to theorize vocational education more broadly through human-centered development, including a rights-based and human capabilities approach.

• McGrath, Simon, and Shoko Yamada. “Skills for Development and Vocational Education and Training: Current and Emergent Trends.” International Journal of Educational Development 102 (2023): 102853.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2023.102853

  The authors offer a five-fold typology of emerging literature on vocational education and training in the last decade, namely educational, economic, constructivist, political-economic, and critical realist. They suggest a post-political economy approach for future work on the Global South, that blends macro-accounts of political economy with empirical research on institutions, social relations, agency and aspirations, and their interplay at multiple scales.

• Ruthven, Orlanda. “Getting Dividend from Demography: Skills Policy and Labour Management in Contemporary Indian Industry.” Journal of South Asian Development 13.3 (2018): 315–336.

  DOI: 10.1177/0973174118822398

  This account of skill training agencies in India, and in particular their post-training job placement efforts, demonstrates how skill training has little to do with the actual learning of skills in practice. Offered as short-term courses, and structured primarily to meet government targets, skilling programs produce workers for low-wage and insecure work in the lowest rungs of formal sector industries, and enable the reproduction of casualized labor.

• Saraf, Radhika. “Skill Training or Nipping Potential in the Bud?” Economic and Political Weekly 51 (2016): 16–19.

  Analyzes employment trends in India against the backdrop of “jobless growth,” or the trend of high rates of economic growth without an accompanying increase in employment. With employment in high-value added service sectors requiring levels of skill training that the majority of the poor cannot access, they are relegated to vocational training programs that prepare them for low-value-added or low-paying work in the informal service economy.