The approach to this study: Avoiding single factor explanations and single best approaches
A preference for multiple factor approaches and for changing pathways rather than single routes
Two groups of pathways for two tiers of the self-employed?
Methods and case studies in informal sector development
Structure of the report
A web of institutional arrangements will be needed to give support to communities and individuals who generate their own employment. Local government structures and financial institutions will have an important facilitative role to play in this. However, appropriate education and training should become available to such people WHICH IS ACCREDITED within the national system (ANC/COSATU 1993:10 emphasis in the original).
Since March 1990 when the World Conference on Education for All was convened, there has been more attention both from national governments and from donors to the entitlement of all children and adults to have access to basic education. Concurrently, there has been arguably more national and international interest in training policies than at any time in the last two decades (ILO, 1993). Equally, policy-makers in both industrialised and developing countries have been looking recently at the scope for more productive employment and self-employment. Although there have not been World Conferences on Employment or on Training for All in this period, there is no doubt that these three items (Education, Training and Employment/Self-employment) have converged more closely in the thinking and writing of policy-makers in the early 1990s than ever before. This is understandable, and can be related to several widely shared concerns, especially in the countries of the developing world which are the focus of this study.
First, the enthusiasm to consider the rights of Education for All (EFA) has been remarkable. As a result of the visibility of the concerns for EFA, many donors and national governments now understand more about their existing achievements in, and commitments to, basic education, and in many cases they have taken bold steps to implement EFA. However, the documentation for the World Conference at Jomtien had very little to say about the work and employment consequences of moving towards EFA. If a nation did strive to provide 'universal access to, and completion of, primary education' and if it sought to secure a real 'improvement in learning achievement' (WCEFA 1990), would that translate into more productive work? Would expenditure on basic schooling and literacy somehow translate into a better, more productive workforce? Many such questions began to be asked about the extended investments in education that the great Jomtien Conference had encouraged.
Second, increasing attention has been given to technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in the last several years. Some of this interest has certainly been due to both popular and political convictions that TVET should be able to assist in the transition from schools to work. In both OECD countries and in the developing world, policy-makers and analysts have been aware that there is no single, most obvious modality for TVET, and hence there has been very considerable debate about what forms of TVET might be most appropriate in different settings. Should TVET be provided in schools (within the basic education cycle), or in dedicated training centres, or in the enterprises themselves, whether large or small? What is clear from the research on comparative TVET is that there is no single 'best practice' in provision of vocational training either in the OECD countries or in the developing regions of the world (King 1994a). As Caillods (1993: 5) has put it: 'In fact, most countries - except perhaps the least developed ones have evolved mixed systems where state vocational and technical schools exist alongside private schools, vocational training centres and industry-based training.'
Finally, very substantial concerns about the world of employment and work have also contributed to some convergence of thought amongst those planning the improvement of education, of training, and of the labour market situation. Especially in the poorer countries of the world, where structural adjustment programmes have been affecting the security of employment even in the once favoured formal sector of the economy, analysts have had to recognise that so far from expanding, this modern sector may actually be contracting. This is clearly not the case in many of the Latin American states but in Africa, for example, governments have had to acknowledge that the public service can no longer be the employer of last resort - not even for university graduates. Indeed, in some states, such as Ghana, it has been precisely from the public sector that many thousands have been laid off as a result of structural adjustment constraints (King 1993; World Bank 1990). In several Eastern European states also and in the countries of the former Soviet Union, there is already selective evidence of massive shedding of labour from public sector concerns, and there are indications that there may well be much more dramatic layoffs once the large public enterprises of Russia and other states face the implications of the market economy and of international competition.
Into this complex equation in which basic education, three years after Jomtien, is still under donor and national pressure rapidly to expand (UNESCO 1993), technical training is registering a knock-on effect from ever larger school numbers, and yet the formal sector of the economy is scarcely expanding and may even be shrinking, it is not difficult to explain the re-emergence on the political agenda of self-employment and the informal sector. This is especially the case in the low income agricultural economies. But unlike the early 1970s when the concept of the informal sector was first used and then became the subject of many studies and projects (frequently externally-funded and executed), it is now viewed as a much more significant object of policy. Planners and policy analysts from several different ministries now recognise that the informal sector is no longer a residual category, referred to in passing in the urban labour force statistics, but its development has become a mainstream objective of several ministries. Even in South Africa where it would be understandable if the education, training and employment agendas were concerned with access for the majority to those levels of the formal sector from which they were excluded, it is no accident that the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions have also flagged the role of self-employment in the economy, as was noted in the quotation right at the outset of this chapter,
This study starts from this very conspicuous policy consensus about the potentially valuable relationships amongst education, training and self-employment. It notes that the policy constituency in developing countries as well as in the donor agencies is looking at new roles for self-employment, micro-enterprise and the informal sector, but is doing so from many different perspectives. Thus education planners and curriculum developers are being asked to develop school-based procedures that will encourage a self-employment or 'enterprise' orientation amongst whole cohorts at primary, secondary and even university level. The same is true of national systems of technical and vocational education and training. Directors of vocational training institutes (VTIs) and Ministries of Labour, for instance, are being asked to marry their traditional technical and vocational training with new approaches to commercial and business skills (ILO 1993). Equally in Ministries of Commerce and Industry, the concern is now no longer exclusively with the so-called modern sector in the industrial areas of the capital city and the largest provincial cities. It is now increasingly with small enterprise development mechanisms, new credit arrangements, and with new political pressures to create an enabling environment for micro-enterprise that ministers are being asked to deal.
It will become clear that it is particularly in the low income agricultural economies of Africa, and in parts of Asia and Latin America that this renewed interest in self-employment and the informal sector has been most marked. Arguably many of these countries are further removed now from incorporation into the global economy of the major industrialised centres than they were in the early 1960s. The combination of a low knowledge base in science and technology, a continuing reliance upon traditional export commodities, and growth opportunities restricted by debt burdens and structural adjustment has meant that many such countries have had to recognise that their 'modern sector' was far from modern, and was not going to prove the engine of growth for their expanding populations. Politicians in these countries have had to acknowledge that the bulk of their people have always generated their own employment, and would do so for the foreseeable future. In fact, much of what is discussed in this book stems from a recognition of the implications for education and training policy of this basic admission. In many ways it has proved a painful admission - that the very institutions (the school and the vocational training system) which were developed to assist in the transition to modern jobs in a modern economy should now be asked to do something substantial for what was once thought of, dismissively, as the traditional sector of the economy.
However, quite suddenly, as in the title of this report, Education and Training for the Informal Sector, self-employment is back on the agenda, not just of national governments, but of the many agencies, bilateral, multilateral and non-governmental, that are assisting them. And though it sounds a straightforward, logical and rather appealing concept, it covers a highly complex set of policy and programme options. In the first set of these the focus could be on the role of the formal education system in affecting self-employment.
i. EDUCATION and training for the informal sector
By emphasizing the potential role of education in its relation to the informal sector, a whole range of possibilities come into play. Intervention could be at any level of the formal education system, from primary school to post-graduate course, or through any of the nonformal education programmes (NFE). It could also involve explicit messages concerning self-employment through tailor-made curricula about enterprise, business studies, commerce etc. Or equally it could be argued that preparation for the world of self-employment need not be explicit; rather, care should be taken simply to ensure that the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and science are in place. These would provide the best foundation, whether for employment or self-employment. As a further alternative, it could be argued that a stress on the development of personal and social skills, along with career counselling, in formal or nonformal education programmes, would offer an equally sound orientation for eventual self-employment. Young people can then turn to the workplace with a confidence in themselves and a realism about the labour market, whether they become employees or have to start out on their own.
These options make very different assumptions about what should be done in schools and in NFE programmes about this logic of eventual self-employment. But most approaches converge on the conviction that good quality education, whatever the curricula, will add value to later employment or self-employment.
ii. Education and TRAINING for the informal sector
By putting the emphasis upon training for the informal sector, the number of policy options is even more numerous. Training could be located in specialised technical streams of mainline schools. It could also be provided through a system of free-standing vocational training institutes. It might also be community based and organised by an NGO. Often this is really a nonformal alternative to the formal training system. Or it could be acquired through direct exposure to industry, with 'dual systems' of release to acquire the theory of the trade at college. Equally, training could be situated entirely within industry, whether large, small or micro-enterprise, and either through formal mechanisms such as apprenticeship systems or through training on the job. Again, as with the education options, these training alternatives can focus on the technical content of skills to be deployed in work, or they can add the dimension of business preparation to the traditional craft skills.
iii. Education and training for the INFORMAL SECTOR
By putting the stress on the informal sector itself rather than on school-based or institution-based policies of preparation, we are pointing to the fact that there are many options for the development of this sector that frankly pay little attention to either education or training outside the enterprise. They emphasise the importance of enterprise-based training which we have just mentioned but they go much further than the provision of education and training programmes to identify the real levers for informal sector development as lying elsewhere. These could involve credit, technology support, infrastructural improvement, and all the other elements that are included in the notion of an 'enabling environment' for micro-enterprise development.
Having briefly indicated the range of possible institutional locations for supporting the informal sector, we should indicate that the approach adopted in this study has not been to try and identify or isolate the single best policy option. A review of the evidence would suggest that the questions about informal sector support are not going to be resolved by further debate about whether efforts should be focused on one kind of education or training element rather than on another. In our view, there has already been too much research that has focused on a single expression of a very complex system or process, and has drawn conclusions about the effectiveness of that single mode not only for the particular country where it was originally studied but also more widely.
This has happened with the debates about 'diversified secondary education', as the World Bank has termed those secondary schools with some degree of orientation towards more vocational subjects. It has happened also with the controversies over the 'vocational school' as in the many discussions of the 'vocational school fallacy'. It has also happened with many specific elements, such as particular credit approaches or 'appropriate technology' options that have at times been thought to work well in facilitating small scale enterprise. Our own judgement is that many of these single factor approaches are misleading. They are particularly likely, once identified as promising, to be lifted out of their original cultural context and applied to fundamentally different situations.
By contrast, we would be tempted to argue that there is no such thing as 'the vocational school', 'the diversified school', 'the traditional apprenticeship', the dual system' or 'the Grameen Bank' credit approach. These particular expressions of training or credit have not been constant over time, but in their different, original, social and cultural settings have developed and changed often quite fundamentally. And even within a single country, the vocational school at the end of the colonial period in, say, the Gold Coast may have almost no connection with vocational schooling in Ghana today.
This search for 'good practice' or for single elements that 'work' or 'don't work' is understandable, and is peculiarly common amongst external donors who are tempted to place their moneys in situations that will have the maximum impact. But we suspect that the very idea of a search for the single item that might make the most impact on the informal sector is a mirage. Similarly, the identification of a particular approach to technical and vocational education and training, such as Germany's dual system, as something that might be adopted or followed elsewhere is likely to be a perilous undertaking. For one thing, the 'dual system' in Germany is intimately connected with a particular history of enterprises, and of highly selective schooling (Boehm 1994). It is a social construct from a very particular society. Its essential elements, such as a widespread company commitment towards training as a long term investment can of course be identified, but transplanting that notion of a dual system into a different culture of enterprise and of education will not necessarily produce anything like the process that currently operates in Germany. As Caillods has argued: 'All of these [original] conditions are not met in many developed countries, and are even less so in most developing countries' (Caillods 1993: 4).
We would argue also that there is, as a corollary, no such thing as 'the traditional apprenticeship system'. There is of course a very dynamic form of local apprenticeship in Ghana and in Nigeria, and in several other countries of both Francophone and Anglophone West Africa, but the danger of using terms like 'traditional African apprenticeship' is precisely that they suggest that there may be an institutional similarity in something called apprenticeship amongst some 50 nations in the continent. The truth of the matter is that there is nothing remotely resembling the formality of the Ghanaian or Nigerian local apprenticeship in the majority of East, Central and Southern African states, and in Latin America the concept (although not the reality) of informal sector apprenticeship is even less visible.
i. The Character of the Interventions
In what follows, the aim has been to illustrate a whole range of interventions, in schools, in nonformal education, in training systems, and in the world of work itself, that are expected to make some impact on attitudes and expertise relevant to the informal sector. Some of these now have a ten or twenty year history behind them, while others are only two or three years old. Most of these illustrations seek to show the kind of thing that national governments, donors and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are encouraging in different settings, in order to make some impact on the informal sector or on self-employment.
In the majority of cases, what are being described are interventions in the formal sector that are intended to affect the informal sector. In other words, these innovations are at one remove from the informal sector itself, being located either in the education system or in the vocational training system. This particular strategy is worth underlining for it suggests that, in the eyes of the innovators, the formal system (both schools and VTIs) can and should be manipulated to direct young people towards a fundamentally different constituency than its traditional one (further education and the modern sector of the economy). Historically, the informal sector emerged on the margins of the formal industrial system, and, in educational terms, it could be said that those who found themselves obliged to be self-employed were often those whom the formal school system had rejected, either through lack of space, finance or ability. In other words, the formal education system had helped to form the informal sector only in this sense of excluding those who then turned to self-employment. The formal education system's traditional mission was to facilitate progress through higher levels of education and training to attain a formal sector job.
In many cases what is now being attempted via the formal education and training systems is the achievement of an impact that is at odds with this traditional mission of these particular institutions. A whole sector that has in some sense been formed because its participants had conspicuously failed to progress higher in school and formal training is now being targetted for those who have not failed, but who are regular students and trainees in schools, training centres and colleges. The intention is that those with high levels of education and training should consider choosing self-employment and the informal sector as a possible destination of first rather than last resort. The required change of institutional priorities resulting from this perspective is quite a tall order for the system and it implies a major shift in the culture of formal sector institutions as well as a new image for self-employment.
ii. Planning for what was Traditionally Unplanned
The other challenge in the present task is that in looking at pathways to self-employment and into the informal sector we are now talking of the potential contributions of education and of training to the process of becoming self-employed. This relationship is quite explicit in the title of the Report: Education and Training for the Informal Sector. However, the majority of the present occupants of the informal sector have in no sense been formed by deliberate programmes of education and training.
It has nonetheless begun to be quite common to see analyses of micro-enterprise development in the informal sector that now pay a good deal more attention to the role of formal education but often stress the lack of formal vocational training. In a not untypical comment, a World Bank team have, for instance, asserted that:
Expansion and improvement of basic education is arguably the most important contributor to rural and informal sector productivity (Adams et al. 1992).
This argument derives from research on existing informal sector workers which has looked at levels of education in the sector, and has drawn conclusions about their differential impact on entering informal sector trades, and developing successful micro-enterprises:
Education is critical in assisting entrance of job seekers to attractive activities. Education enhances success within micro-enterprises in these activities. Indeed primary or higher levels of education are often essential for those who wish to become an apprentice in these relatively attractive occupations (World Bank 1992: 93).
But the same is true of much else that is written about pathways into self-employment and the informal sector; it is commenting on workers who have reached their current positions without receiving any programme that was specifically designed 'for the informal sector', and it is deducing, retrospectively, how much (or very often how little) education and training they actually received, and what its influence may have been in entering their particular line of work.
By contrast today there are whole programmes of governments, donors and NGOs that are framed around the notion of explicit preparation for the informal sector in general education systems, nonformal education programmes, and in vocational training institutions, and these are paralleled by many reports and studies that also examine such targetted preparation. Just one example among many would be Hoppers' The Promotion of Self-Employment in Education and Training Institutions: Perspectives in East and Southern Africa (ILO 1992). In other words, organisations are increasingly seeking to plan for what was earlier allowed to happen without any planning or intervention.
iii. Routes and Pathways to the Informal Sector
After examining, in the chapters that follow, some of these many large and small-scale interventions in schools and training institutions and in the workplace itself, we proceed to look at what are some of the combinations of education, training and work experience that seem to illustrate current pathways to work. In general, these routes are based on studies of workers who have not benefitted from tailored programmes for self-employment. This is understandable for in many cases, the innovations towards self-employment are too recent or have affected too few people to have begun to have an impact. In other cases, these policies appear to be in place, for they figure prominently in Education Commissions or in the conclusions of major agency conference documents, but at the level of the schools, VTIs or the labour market itself, they may be scarcely visible. This caution should be borne in mind when we reach the appropriate section.
We stress the diversity of these pathways to self-employment, for the same reasons as Caillods has summarised for pathways towards employment:
Such surveys carried out in developed and in developing countries consistently show that there is not one single way of acceding to skilled occupations: workers and employees acquire their skills in a variety of ways, through on-the-job training and experience, through short training courses in enterprises, vocational centres, or private institutions (Caillods 1993: 3).
Although much less work has been done on routes to self-employment than on employment, we suspect that the diversity is even more marked in terms of routes to the former, since the world of self-employment and of the informal sector is itself so varied.
iv. What Kind of Self-Employment in what Kind of Informal Sector are we Talking About?
Running through this study, there is a rather fundamental distinction being drawn between at least two main styles or experiences of self-employment and of the informal sector. It is worth highlighting these now, for in the literature on this topic it is possible to detect these two strains running through the debates, though in many cases no distinctions are made, and the informal sector and self-employment are described as if it is obvious that a homogeneous sector is being referred to.
One basic distinction that appears in many different accounts of the informal sector is what King ( 1980) called subsistence self-employment versus entrepreneurship self-employment more than 12 years ago. This is sometimes described as the difference between the upper echelons or the upper tier of the informal sector where the self-employed may be thought of as micro-entrepreneurs and the much larger, lower reaches or lower tier of the self-employed, where they may also be termed the casual poor, disadvantaged groups, or, in a word, populations that are surviving rather than developing through self-employment. It is very important to be clear which group is being discussed at any time, for the umbrella term 'self-employment' can cover a whole range of different economic fortunes. But in making this division, we of course do not intend to suggest that there is something static about the situation of those' who can broadly be classified in this way. Clearly, there are many examples of individuals who have emerged from subsistence self-employment to become dramatically successful entrepreneurs. And on the other side there are individual firms which have moved from looking entrepreneurial to being on the point of collapse. The following illustration from a World Bank document, however, makes a distinction which is often left quite unclear in other discussions:
In the lower tier of the urban informal sector, market saturation in stagnant economies can impede successful entry into self-employment. The establishment or expansion of more productive, upper-tier enterprises can be severely constrained by lack of access to credit and raw materials, or by excessive government licensing and regulations (Adams et al. 1992).
The importance of this rough distinction is crucial to the images of self-employment that are projected by the different agencies concerned to intervene in the sector. As a broad generalisation it may be argued that the representation of the informal sector in the minds of many bilateral and multilateral agencies is that of the upper tier. Here, it is hoped that dynamic micro-entrepreneurs will be found who may even 'graduate' from the informal sector to become the next generation of local businessmen operating in the modern sector. The images here are of successful competition, business skills, individualism and dynamism. These are also the objectives that drive the current sponsors of entrepreneurship development programmes, In this connection it is commonplace to hear Loucks' distinction within the world of the self-employed: 'while all entrepreneurs are self-employed, all self-employed are not entrepreneurs' (Loucks in Mburugu 1993:1).
To an extent, a version of this dynamic, self-reliant informal sector is what also now gets put across in many schools and colleges. Clearly, there is little to be gained by rural or poor urban schools emphasising that their task is to keep children where they are, down on the farm or in the urban slums. Consequently, schools stress the potential of self-employment for making money, - as much or more than by getting a regular job. A primary school text in Kenya, for example, exhorts pupils as follows:
In other words when you finish school, the question should not be WHO WILL EMPLOY ME BUT HOW WILL I EMPLOY MYSELF? In many cases, you will find that self-employment is more paying than being employed by another person (Gatama 1986: 66).
Meanwhile in Nigeria, advertisements aimed at university graduates urge them to reconsider their old ideas: 'Self-employment for a secure future!' 'Be your own boss - be self-employed!' (King 1990a: 17).
This preference for focusing on the upper tier with its image of rugged individualism is not universal amongst the agencies concerned with the informal sector. In particular, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) often have hesitations about using their funds for projects that help just a few individuals to succeed, by escaping from poverty and becoming small scale capitalists. Their tendency, powerfully supported in Christian NGOs by an ethic that focuses on the development of the group or the community, is to emphasise various schemes for cooperative or collaborative growth. Their charter and mission are much more likely to mean they will target the poorest of the poor (cf. The Catholic Church's 'Option for the Poor'), and will explore ways that will allow more income to be generated by them, through better technologies, group savings schemes, new skills etc. etc.. In some countries, e.g. India, this focus on the group is also a response to a perception that the state is already providing preferential treatment to the more upwardly mobile individual entrepreneurs through small scale and micro-enterprise policies (D'Souza and Thomas 1993). A recent evaluation of NGO activities in India makes the point about their group focus:
NGOs in India have concentrated their energies on raising the economic and social status of the poor by creating village level groups or associations. Group formation has become something of a creed for Indian NGOs, with the aim of promoting collective solidarity and to ensure that benefits arising from development interventions are targetted more effectively (Robinson 1991: 121-2).
Within the community of the poor, there has often been a particular focus on women, and frequently NGOs are involved in schemes that seek to generate more income and better working conditions for self-employed women. This is particularly because it is women who find themselves undertaking much of the most casual, lowest skill and least rewarded activities in the informal sector, as will be clear in a later chapter.
Generally in this chapter and throughout the following chapters, we have divided the informal sector broadly into subsistence and enterprise sub-sectors. However, we would just want to enter here a caveat about our distinction. We would wish to stress that not all micro-entrepreneurs must be considered informal sector actors. In India, for example, it appears that many of the successful micro-entrepreneurs being developed by Enterprise Development Institutes (EDIs) are university graduates. It can be argued that many of these entrepreneurs are only informal in the sense of size, and are clearly modern sector in their orientation. A similar third category of what might be termed modern sector enterprise self-employment can be detected in many other countries. But this group will not be the focus of this study.
Even this rather basic division between survival self-employment and entrepreneurship self-employment means that the kinds of combinations of education, training and experience we were referring to earlier need to be adjusted to take account of these diverse situations. Thus as one end of the spectrum of self-employment, it may be the case that parents and students are beginning to think that formal training in business skills is quite a relevant addition to a full secondary education or a university degree. Hence a pathway may be constructed that builds upon a complete secondary or further education. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the idea of even a full secondary education let alone university - would be a luxury. Here the pathway would consist of a minimum of basic education, but followed, at best, by on-the-job training, since there would be little or no money to acquire off-the-job training, unless an NGO was operating in the vicinity.
We shall go into these routes and pathways in more detail later on, but here it is necessary simply to re-emphasise our earlier point that there can be no single royal road to self-employment. Entrepreneurship development courses offered in VTIs to those who have completed secondary school cannot by definition have any impact upon the subsistence self-employed, since they will already have had to quit the formal education system years before. As a corollary, interventions for disadvantaged groups may well involve multiple elements, since these may be needed to compensate for a poor self-image associated with minimum schooling and precarious literacy.
We have already insisted that initiatives for self-employment and informal sector development do not emerge as elements that can be easily isolated from a particular social, cultural and economic context. Innovations for the poor or for micro-entrepreneurs cannot readily be lifted from one cultural context and be grafted on to a fundamentally different institutional situation. It is for this reason that an integral part of this present research and analysis has been a series of four case studies, from India, East Africa (Kenya), West Africa (Ghana), and Chile. These make it possible to see how the notion of the informal sector relates to different traditions of schooling, training, and industry that are each themselves changing as a result of political and economic shifts at the country and regional levels.
Perhaps the changes in Chile have been the most dramatic. There the shift from authoritarian to democratic rule has altered the role of NGOs, it has introduced, since 1990, major changes in some of the poorest schools (Guttman 1993), but it has proved much less easy to change the character of training in industry and commerce, given the wider patterns of industrial restructuring in Latin America and their implications for labour utilisation. But there is a paradox about the role of the informal sector in Chile: at one level, the informal sector is clearly an important part of the economy as it is in many other Latin American countries. At another level, the informal sector is almost invisible as far as government policy is concerned (Messina 1993). The emphasis is much more on modern export-oriented industry whether large or small scale. The economic model, as a consequence, is much less concerned with accepting and dynamising the informal sector than with learning from other dramatically successful exporting countries such as Korea. Chile is by no means unique in its attitude towards the informal sector, as can be seen in one of the most influential economic blue-prints for the region, Education and knowledge: basic pillars of changing production patterns with social equity (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean OREALC 1992).
India, too, has had major changes in its thinking about education since the National Policy on Education (NPE) in 1986. Like many education commissions this emphasised the impact on wider national development goals of active and creative learning in schools, but, seven years later, research at the state level would indicate that 'there is little to suggest that existing institutions and structures have departed sufficiently from a long-standing quantitative orientation to allow realisation of the NPE 1986 policy idea of qualitative improvement of elementary education' (Dyer 1993: 17). This is a caution about the speed with which innovations in schools can be implemented, let alone have their intended effect on the labour market. More specifically within the India case study, there is very powerful evidence of the resistance that can be encountered in the formal education and training system when ideas about using the school or vocational training systems for self-employment are brought up (D'Souza and Thomas 1993: 5; Awasthi 1993).
Kenya had sought radically to alter its basic schooling from as early as 1984, and it is relevant to this present report that the intended focus of change included a much greater emphasis on practical skills for orientation to self-employment. Here, too, some ten years later the case study reports that 'it is unlikely that the education system will provide directly employable skills to the students, unless a new approach in teaching is adopted' (Oketch 1993: 41). As in the schooling reforms, so in the more general policy reforms towards the informal sector, it has been argued that they have 'failed to go beyond intention', even though there are now persuasive policy documents in place (Assuncao 1993: 14).
Finally, the case study from Ghana also comments on the attempt to include in the new school syllabus materials that can contribute directly to greater self-reliance and self-employment Thus the very country that was the original site of the vocational school fallacy (which argued that school-based vocational education could not affect unemployment) was again, in this World-Bank supported educational reform, looking to schools for a significant contribution towards attitude formation for enterprise (Boeh-Ocansey 1993). The Ghana case study, however, illustrates much more widely than the school context how many different institutions, from trade associations, technology units, to export promotion councils, are in a position actively to support (or undermine) initiatives for dynamic self employment development.
Chapters 2 to 4 examine in turn the three different sites for interventions aimed at the informal sector (formal and nonformal education, post school and out-of-school vocational training institutions, and the workplace or the enterprise itself). In chapter 5 we take special note of the problems faced by girls and women in entering forms of really productive self-employment, as opposed to situations in which the aims are barely an improvement upon subsistence or survival work in the informal sector.
In chapter 6 we turn to examine what are some of the other elements that are often associated with informal sector development. In general, these may be thought of as non-education or non-training-related interventions. They cover items such as credit, technology or the enabling environment. Clearly they need to be discussed; the impression might otherwise be given that education and training on their own could have a direct impact on informal sector development. Having reviewed the role of some of these principal non-education and non-training factors in the encouragement of self-employment we return to the question of pathways that has been briefly touched upon above. We seek to illustrate ways of thinking about interventions in the informal sector that may take account of several quite distinct pathways.
A very significant part of the report is the bibliography. This draws together a substantial listing of materials from different case study countries, from donors and NGOs, and from research and policy centres working on small enterprise and its connections with education and training. It would be appropriate, however, at this point to underline the fact that we have drawn a good deal more on materials available in English than those in German, French, Spanish or Portuguese, and as a corollary many of our examples - but by no means all - are from countries that make use of English as a language of wider communication.
The bibliography is in some ways very specific to the title of our report. There is of course a great deal available in print on the informal sector; similarly there is a mass of material on education and vocational training. There is very much less work on education and training that actually makes some linkage to self-employment and the informal sector. And the same would be true of the support services we examine in the last chapter. We have sought generally to identify those sources that are particularly concerned with the key relationships between education, work and other supportive interventions.
