MIL Africa Engine

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Stephanie Allais, Faculty member, Centre for Researching Education and Labour, University of the Witwatersrand

South Africa’s 50 public technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges are, in the main, struggling institutions.

In many, throughput rates – how many students qualify in the expected time – are low. Some lecturers are under-qualified and under-resourced. Relationships with employers, which are crucial for the type of training that these colleges offer, are uneven.

Colleges are hard pressed to provide training to young people with weak schooling behind them and no clear path to employment ahead. The youth unemployment rate is almost 44%.

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The response to problems in the sector has been reform: rename the colleges, restructure them, give them new governance models, new qualification types, new funding arrangements. Over 30 years of democracy, South Africa has done all of these things, repeatedly. It has not worked.

And now there’s another round of changes being rolled out. There is little clearly documented explanation of what the new system is and how it will work in practice. But colleges have been instructed that most current qualification offerings will be phased out and replaced by new “occupational” qualifications.

In 2024 I wrote a paper tracing the history of the technical and vocational training sector, drawing on published literature, my research on skills development and my own involvement in South Africa’s education and training policy processes. The paper sets out why the sector is not working and what it needs to succeed.

In my view, based on the history of the sector, there is a serious risk that the latest reforms will make things worse.

Thirty years of the same mistake

South Africa’s policy vision and funding model for TVET colleges has, like that of many other countries, been to base funding on student enrolment for programmes that are linked to employer demand. It assumes colleges will respond to what employers want, and channel young people into jobs.

It has a long and largely unsuccessful track record, with problems in many countries – most extensively documented in Australia and the UK, the originators of the broad policy model.

The problem is structural. Funding institutions only through enrolments in specific programmes provides no institutional stability. It creates no incentive to invest in equipment, lecturers, or long-term relationships with employers. It treats colleges as if they were competing as private training providers.

When the programmes that attract funded enrolments change – as they do, repeatedly – colleges are left with stranded staff, obsolete equipment, and no financial buffer. And when new funding is made available, for new programmes, they don’t have lecturers who can teach them.

Private institutions tend not to offer manufacturing-related programmes – those are expensive. They focus on business-related programmes, which are cheaper.

Consider the National Technical Education Diploma (Nated) qualifications, the government-funded programmes that colleges have provided for decades. First, they were to be phased out. Then, when the National Development Plan created TVET enrolment targets, colleges were told to expand them. Colleges have built up staffing around them and enrolled students in them.

Now, the Department of Higher Education and Training has instructed colleges to phase them out. What replaces them are “occupational qualifications”.

The occupational qualifications problem

The department defines an occupation as

a set of jobs whose main tasks and duties are characterised by a high degree of similarity (skill specialisation).

The theory behind occupational qualifications is sound: link qualifications to specific occupations, make workplace experience part of the qualification, and graduates will have credentials that employers recognise and value.

The framework has thousands of occupations.

The problem – and here is where our new research (not yet published online) is indicating an uncomfortable finding – is that many of the “occupations” to which these new qualifications are linked do not really exist in workplaces and labour markets. And there is little publicly available information about them.

Some “occupations” have special skills that need special training, and others are really just jobs.

For example, in our research (not yet online) across 53 food and beverage manufacturing plants, we found that there are artisan trades like millwrighting, fitting and turning, and electrical work which fit the idea of an occupation. But machine operators don’t fit that description. Yet machine operators are among the new qualifications to be offered. The employers we visited don’t need those qualifications. They would rather hire someone they can train themselves, to use the equipment in their plant.

Training in a “knowledge module” like “personal mastery and interpersonal relationships” is not specific to the “occupation” of operating a machine.

You cannot create an occupation by developing a qualification for it. It works the other way: the occupation must exist before you create a qualification for it.

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Read more: Jobs of the future: South Africa has major gaps in skills needed to shape the green economy

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This is not an abstract concern. Colleges are now being instructed to gain accreditation to offer these qualifications, to hire staff to teach them, to find workplace placements for students doing them – all on the assumption that there is a real occupational destination at the end.

For artisans, this assumption holds: there are real occupations that translate to opportunities in the workplace. But for the majority of new occupational qualifications being developed, far more analysis is needed.

What institutions actually need

Colleges cannot become strong institutions through enrolment-driven funding alone, any more than a school can become strong by being paid per pupil with no base funding for teachers or classrooms. And calling qualifications “occupational” does not mean that they will lead to work where there is no meaningful occupation in labour markets or workplaces.

Institutions need a stable core – employed lecturers, maintained equipment, administrative capacity – that allows them to function as institutions rather than as collections of projects cobbled together from different funding streams.

Some of them may be better off offering second-chance matric (secondary school leaving certificate) programmes instead of narrowly focused programmes where there are few real opportunities for employment in the surrounding areas, and no way colleges can find work placements for their learners.

Pockets of genuine excellence exist in the current system: colleges with good employer relationships and real employment outcomes for graduates. What they have in common is principled management, experienced staff, and enough stability to build relationships over time. The system should be trying to replicate those conditions.

In my view, what needs to happen is this:

• colleges should be funded with a core institutional grant, and enabled to provide a mix of training that reflects their local economic contexts

• occupational qualifications should be rolled out only where employers need them.

Otherwise the latest reforms risk repeating the errors of the past 30 years. Colleges and young people deserve better than that.

– Reforms to South Africa’s technical colleges keep failing students and employers: why?
– https://theconversation.com/reforms-to-south-africas-technical-colleges-keep-failing-students-and-employers-why-278711

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ikechukwu (Ike) Nwaka, Assistant Lecturer, Business Economics, University of Alberta

Nigerian women of working age are mostly (90%) self-employed. By comparison, self-employment accounts for less than 16% of employment in high-income countries such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. It is far lower in middle-income countries like South Africa and Turkey too.

Official statistics show that self-employment in Nigeria is concentrated in the northern regions. And there’s a gender difference: women make up the majority of those working for themselves (Figure 1).

What these numbers do not explain is why women are far more likely than men to operate businesses from their homes, or whether those businesses generate meaningful economic returns.

As economists working on labour, gender, energy and development, we addressed these questions in a recent paper.

Using nationally representative household data from 2010 to 2019, the study examines why Nigerian women run enterprises from their homes. These kinds of operations include selling goods from a front room, preparing food at home, or offering haircuts, beauty services, laundry and dry cleaning, and shoe repair. They also make textiles, crafts, garments, shoes and cosmetics at home rather than in shops, kiosks or workshops.

The findings challenge the idea that home-based self-employment is mainly about personal preference or flexibility.

Childcare responsibilities, housing access, electricity and cultural norms strongly shape women’s work location. These insights reveal that supporting women in business must go beyond training or microfinance, and remove structural barriers.

Childcare limits women’s workplaces

We first identified factors associated with operating home-based businesses, using data (2010-2019) from national surveys that follow the same households over time.

We then examined how individual, household and contextual factors shape the likelihood of operating a business from home. We found that childcare was the strongest factor influencing women’s choice of work location.

The presence of young children doesn’t much affect where men work. For women, however, having young children makes it more likely they will run a business from home.

In Nigeria, women shoulder most of the unpaid domestic labour, including childcare, cooking and cleaning. Home-based businesses allow women to earn income while doing that labour.

For many women, home-based work may not be the most attractive option. Rather, the patterns we saw in the data suggest that it’s a way to reconcile income-earning with unpaid domestic responsibilities. Other research into women’s experiences has also shown that working from home may be a necessity rather than a choice.

Why home ownership doesn’t benefit women equally

Homeowners who operate home-based enterprises are better positioned to use property as collateral, access credit, expand workspace, or invest in equipment. They are able to turn housing into productive capital.

However, these advantages are not equally accessible to women.

Only 8.2% of women aged 20-49 are sole owners of land, compared with 34.2% of men, according to World Bank research into gender disparities in property ownership in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Nigerian constitution grants women equal rights to own, inherit and manage property. But many face legal, financial and social barriers that limit their actual control over assets.

Even in owner-occupied households, customary and patriarchal practices can mean that ownership doesn’t translate into decision-making power. Consequently, the same asset generates different economic returns for men and women. It confines women to lower-return home-based activities.

We found that 67% of female homeowners operate home-based enterprises compared with 33% of male owners. Most men who own homes work away from home.

Geography and social norms matter

We found that home-based enterprises are concentrated in poorer regions where returns are low, particularly in northern Nigeria, as shown in figure 2.

Even after accounting for income and education, women in northern Nigeria are far more likely to run businesses from home than women in the south. Cultural and religious norms that restrict women’s mobility and public participation probably play a central role.

This complicates global policy narratives that frame home-based work as inherently empowering. In Nigeria, it often reflects the need to juggle paid work with household obligations under restrictive conditions. These businesses tend to cluster in low-entry sectors, offer limited skill development, and have little growth potential.

Education helps, but only up to a point

Education and household income do expand women’s options, but their effects are limited. Our study shows that better-educated women are less likely than equally educated men to remain in home-based businesses when alternatives are available.

As household income rises, women are also less likely to operate enterprises from home. Importantly, observable characteristics do not explain the full gender gap. The study finds that less than half of the difference in home-based self-employment can be attributed to education, household size, marital status and housing. The rest likely reflects deeper structural forces that shape outcomes differently for men and women. These are forces like social norms, unequal access to finance, gendered returns to assets, and expectations around unpaid care work.

What this means for policy

Promoting home-based self-employment as a route to women’s economic empowerment can be misleading. When women are pushed into home-based enterprises because childcare is expensive, institutions and property rights are weak, or finance is inaccessible, entrepreneurship becomes a response to constraint, not opportunity.

Policies that reduce childcare costs, strengthen women’s property and inheritance rights, and improve access to credit are likely to do more to expand women’s choices than entrepreneurship programmes alone.

Digital infrastructure can help some home-based businesses reach wider markets, but only if deeper barriers are addressed. And because constraints vary across regions, one-size-fits-all solutions are unlikely to work.

More than flexibility

Home-based self-employment in Nigeria reflects deeply gendered expectations about work and care. Many women work from home not to assert independence, but because they have limited options.

Recognising this distinction matters. Celebrating women’s “flexibility” without addressing the constraints behind it risks turning resilience into a permanent requirement. A more equal future is one in which women can choose where and how they work, rather than adjusting their livelihoods around structural barriers.

– Working from home in Nigeria: study finds women don’t have much choice
– https://theconversation.com/working-from-home-in-nigeria-study-finds-women-dont-have-much-choice-274792