Introduction

Kenneth King¹

¹ Kenneth King is Professor of International and Comparative Education and Director of the Centre of African Studies, The University of Edinburgh.

Unemployment and under-employment are huge and growing global problems. The International Labour Office describes the problem as a long-term persistent trend affecting up to 30% of the global labour force, some 820 million men and women (ILO, 1994). These figures, for all their magnitude, do little to convey a full sense of the poverty and insecurity of those who face the daily challenges of life without an adequate means of livelihood. Their numbers are growing in almost all countries, and the categories of the unemployed are growing as well. Tens of millions of young school leavers, women, the recently "down-sized", demobilised combatants, displaced persons, retrenched civil servants and others are joining the ranks of those many already seeking work. Much too little is known about the extent to which training can help those who are struggling to find or create productive employment.

During the 1990s more and more governments and agencies have become aware that their policies towards education, training and employment require fundamental rethinking. At least two major dimensions of these recent policy shifts can be detected. On the one hand, the World Conference on Education For All, at Jomtien, Thailand, in March, 1990, put basic education back on to the agenda. In both sector policies as well as projects and programmes there is marked evidence of renewed commitment to basic education. On the other hand, the very search to deliver Education for All (EFA) by the year 2000 has confronted national governments as well as development agencies with the question of what might follow EFA, and the dilemma that most countries have no possibility of offering "employment for all". Perhaps surprisingly, employment has not yet been the focus of one of the grand series of world conferences, which, since 1990, have covered women, population, human rights, the environment and social development. Certainly there is at least an equal need to consider the issue of employment.

Structural adjustment programmes, the forces of globalisation and increasingly competitive markets have stripped away the protective barriers that have shielded the economies of many developing countries. In many countries, formal sector employment is too large to be sustainable, even while absorbing only a small and decreasing fraction of the economically active population. Traditional agriculture and family farms are less and less able to absorb the surplus. One of the most obvious outcomes has been the rise in the numbers of those being squeezed out of modern sector employment, and the loss of what Ronald Dore once termed "real jobs" (Dore, 1976). By the late 1980s even many of the remaining real jobs, while notionally still in the modern sector, had lost their glitter. They still offered some security, but the financial rewards had fallen steeply. It is now clear that "real jobs" offer no hope of being the answer to the growing demand for more and more jobs.

It is increasingly obvious that the great majority of the population will have to find work in small family businesses or as employees in the large and growing informal economy. The World Bank recently reported that a quarter of all non-agricultural workers in Asia and Latin America are already in the informal sector, and that the informal sector comprises up to 60% of the labour force in the urban areas of many Sub-Saharan African countries (World Bank, 1991). The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that, in many developing countries, the informal sector is already 30 - 70% of the economically active population, and projects that this might grow to 95% in some parts of Africa by the year 2020 (Halvorson-Quevedo, 1992).

This recognition of the informal economy as the "ordinary economy", the one where most people work and learn, has been a long time coming. Not many planners responded to the recognition of a clearly emerging trend when the Nigerian traditional apprenticeship system was first revealed, by Callaway in the early 1960s, as the entry point to a large and growing informal sector (Callaway, 1964). And when the International Labour Organisation began promoting the potential of the informal sector as a result of their 1972 Employment Mission to Kenya (ILO, 1972), there was still, for years afterwards, a tendency to think of it as merely a peripheral urban phenomenon.

Only in the late 1980s and in the 1990s has it been recognised, especially in the low and lower middle income countries, that the informal sector is a phenomenon of considerable significance and scale. It has also become understood that, due to the absence of employment benefit schemes in most developing countries, the huge majority of the population, young and old, male and female, have not been unemployed. They have always worked. The problem is that a very large number of these workers have been engaged in what is often called subsistence or survival work (McGrath, King et al., 1995).

Just as there are different levels of self-employment, there are different motivations for seeking self-employment. Many can aspire to little more than subsistence. For some self-employment is a temporary safety-net, used to prevent a personal or family problem from becoming a tragedy. But many others are seeking a step up, a firm grasp on the first rung or a second or third of the economic ladder. For these the goal is entrepreneurial self-employment rather than merely subsistence or survival. Though the ranks of the self-employed include relatively few true entrepreneurs they do include many millions who own and operate viable small businesses - and the ranks of the unemployed include many millions who aspire to join them.

The title of this book is an important pointer to several basic and inter-related truths. First, there are practically no new jobs, and especially not the "real jobs" that once inspired so much rural-urban migration and sacrificial investment in schooling and in vocational training during the 1960s and 1970s. Secondly, self-employment cannot, like a conjuring trick, solve the problem of joblessness. Thirdly, there is an important distinction to be made between subsistence or survivalist self-employment and the more viable and beneficial self-employment that is characteristic of successful self-employed microentrepreneurs.

Grierson accepts that the poor (and the not-so-poor) necessarily do work, and for long hours under often arduous conditions, in all developing countries. But his purpose here is not to present a formula that will somehow offer Enterprise For All or Productive self-employment For All. That would be a cruel mirage. His mission in this book is much more limited and more focused, and concerns the extent to which vocational training can be utilised selectively to support the creation and growth of microenterprises that are viable businesses, however modest in scale.

Where There Is No Job is not a textbook. It is a straightforward account of some of the basic principles underpinning vocational training for self-employment, with the evidence of case studies and examples to show how these principles are being applied in a variety of different circumstances. Where There Is No Job is a brief practical guide for designers, practitioners and evaluators.

Any discussion of what training can and cannot do for job creation in the face of the enormous and increasing populations of many developing countries is very timely. Most existing vocational training systems - barring traditional apprenticeships and many forms of on-the-job training - are of questionable usefulness to those seeking self-employment. They provide neither readily marketable skills, nor enterprise opportunities, nor access to business development services. Indeed, it is commonly accepted that the growing inability of training systems to support self-employment is itself a problem of crisis proportions. Hence, the growing interest in self-employment is driven by both the quest for effective means of addressing the unemployment crisis and the need to address this growing crisis of vocational training.

These twin forces are driving many agencies to rethink their education and training policies. Many have been reconsidering their attachment to formal sector-oriented vocational training and higher education, and have begun to acknowledge the potential of the informal sector. The International Labour Organisation was among the pioneers, first in its reports Rural and Urban Vocational Training (ILO, 1985: 45), and Rural and Urban Training in Africa (ILO, 1988: 14- 15), and later in the report The Promotion of Self-employment (ILO, 1990). In 1991 the World Bank devoted a sub-section of its Vocational and Technical Education and Training policy paper to "training for rural and urban self-employment (World Bank, 1991: 59-61). Germany's BMZ followed, in 1992, with a subsection of its policy paper, Vocational Training, devoted to "promoting target groups from the informal sector" (BMZ, 1992:17-20). Britain's DfID argued, in its Education Policy Paper, that there was likely to be a link between the provision of basic education and enterprise development, and that education and training might provide a link between income generation and poverty reduction (DfID, 1994: 3). The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation is very explicit about the priority of the "qualification needs" and development potential of the informal sector. This new priority is clearly stated in SDC's two main vocational education policy objectives:

1. Vocational and personal qualifications for craftsmen, craftswomen and workers, both employed and self-employed; and

2. Target-group, poverty alleviation and employment oriented vocational education for... people in the informal sector (SDC, 1994:17).

The problem with this rather recent pre-occupation with the informal sector, and with self-employment training, is that few development agencies (whether multilateral, bilateral or NGOs) have had long term exposure to the informal sector, and many that have, especially among NGOs, are still troubled by the very notion of individual enterprise. Those bilaterals that are particularly concerned with vocational training (e.g. BMZ/GTZ, SIDA, DANIDA, SDC) have little direct experience of the microenterprise sector amongst those responsible for formal sector vocational training. And though the multilaterals, such as the World Bank and the European Commission, have a great deal of experience in support of microenterprise, very little of this has been associated with the divisions responsible for Education and Training. In general, most agencies have until very recently talked too loosely about training for the informal sector and for self-employment. But then, so too did many national governments as they proposed that all education and training institutions be re-oriented to education and training for self-employment.

John Grierson has been intimately identified with the nuts and bolts of what works and doesn't work in microenterprise development for over 20 years. His message is refreshingly direct. It is particularly important to recognise that it is a message that does not come from a vocational trainer suddenly made aware of the informal sector, or from an educationalist worried about the follow-on to EFA, or from a social science researcher caught up in the new fascination with globalisation and its implications for local industry. Grierson is a former businessman who has been working in the field of enterprise development since arriving in Botswana in 1974 to help initiate Botswana's first business extension programme.

Because he has been a businessman he recognises both the self-help potential and the unavoidable rigours of enterprise. As a result he has long been apprehensive about approaches that treat self-employment as an option of last resort, and concerned about the often overly optimistic use of microenterprise as a mechanism for direct assistance to the severely disadvantaged and those in greatest need. Enterprise assistance for Grierson is not a medicine that can be administered to all. It is a potion best taken by those who recognise its potential, who have a personal vision of how to capture this potential - and who have at least the minimum capacities and resources to master the challenges involved. And as with all medicines, its formulation must be for a clear and specific need and its application must be in limited carefully prescribed doses.

This book looks at situations where "vocational training" seems to be an appropriate medicine to treat the problem of "no job", and at a number of programmes that have been rigorous in defining and controlling the dosage of training provided. A sense of great need and an acute awareness of limited resources underpin the thinking and practices of most of these programmes. In most cases the approaches described are based upon traditional practices - and in particular upon traditional apprenticeships. While imperfect in many respects, traditional practices have shown themselves to be widespread, low-cost, culturally appropriate, and economically sustainable. Traditional practices also have less well-known benefits. Because they are an integral part of local markets and communities they offer access to the networks of customers, contacts and suppliers that are essential if trainees are indeed to become self-employed. However, when adapted to emphasise self-employment, traditional practices present new design and management challenges. The subtle balance of incentives that motivates both employers and their apprentices changes when self-employment is the ultimate objective. Established entrepreneurs are not so clearly motivated to provide training opportunities when the apprentice's goal is self-employment. The programmes described here have had to detect and adjust to the different incentive patterns that have resulted from their emphasis on self-employment.

Grierson urges us to use the characteristics that are the strengths of traditional apprenticeship systems to enhance the design of self-employment initiatives, and to recognise the benefits of approaches that, like apprenticeship, put obligations on the trainees to be pro-active and, in a sense, the masters of their own training. This is why the case studies are so suggestive; they powerfully reinforce the message that runs through the book about the need for both market and client responsive designs for the selection, training and support of new entrants to microenterprise.

There is a strong sense that the experience distilled in this volume is reinforced by lessons from the literature. But even more persuasively, the text bears all the hallmarks of experience hard won through many years' involvement in the design, management and evaluation of training for self-employment programmes.

Kenneth King
Edinburgh, Scotland
April, 1997