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Youth Employment in Sierra Leone
most of it from high-income countries, is mixed. There are few evaluations of equivalency programs by themselves. Those that are available suggest a positive effect of later access to further education and training opportunities for the disadvantaged.When equivalency programs are combined with other services as part of
Box 5.3 Improving Traditional Apprenticeship Training in Kenya through Competition The Kenyan NGO Strengthening Informal Training and Enterprise (SITE) ran the Jua Kali project from 1996 to 1998 to improve traditional apprenticeship training.The objectives were to upgrade the technical and managerial skills of master craftspeople, enable them to diversify their production, strengthen their capacity to provide quality training to apprentices, and improve the capacity of selected vocational training institutes to provide ongoing training to master craftspeople.Vouchers are issued to unemployed young people, who select their own training provider based on their needs and objectives. The main lessons from this intervention included the following: 1. Master craftspeople are not immediately interested in receiving skills training and need to be “hooked.� Training has to be put in the broader context of business improvement and the transfer of marketable skills into tangible gains. Training has to be delivered in a flexible manner, taking into account the opportunity cost of the labor and the time of participants. 2. Master craftspeople seek training not mainly to increase fees for traditional apprenticeships but to increase income from productive aspects of their businesses. 3. Training interventions proved a useful entry point for upgrading the technology of small and medium-size enterprises. 4. Linkages with vocational training institutes proved disappointing— they did not become sustainable providers of training to Jua Kali. 5. Independent trainers could be promoted as training providers to the informal sector. This is probably a more sustainable approach than working through vocational training institutes, which, as now structured, appear to have little potential for promoting employment in the informal sector. 6. Collaboration with informal sector associations is of prime importance. 7. Upgrading informal sector enterprises is possible through well-targeted skills development. Source: Haan 2001.