EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING PAPERS 43 Learning to change: Skills development among the economically vulnerable and socially excluded in developing countries

Foreword Concerned by increasing poverty and social exclusion around the world, and by the inadequate emphasis so far placed on skills and training as a critical component of any strategy for tackling the problem, the ILO's Training Policies and Systems Branch launched a study on the subject in 1998. The report, which is here issued as an Employment and Training Paper, examines the current " training crisis " in terms of the limited impact that existing vocational training has had on the poor. It pays particular attention to the failure of training systems as a whole to reorient their activities towards the poor, although this would be vital to provide them with the knowledge and skills required for a significant increase in their productivity and incomes. More importantly, it identifies the elements for a pro-poor training strategy. In the light of the findings, some weaknesses are identified in the current ILO standards (Convention no. 142 and Recommendation no. 150) on human resources development. I wish to thank: Paul Bennell for producing this excellent report as an ILO external consultant; Eugenia Date-Bah for developing the analytical framework to launch the study and for supervising the preparation of the report; CINTERFOR, other ILO offices and teams, and a number of other bodies for responding to our request for relevant materials; and colleagues in Geneva for their comments on a draft of this text. The printing of this report is one of the efforts the ILO is making to widely distribute its findings and concerns on this critical issue, and to share the information with relevant actors in order to support and galvanize action. Preparation is also under way for an expert group discussion based on the document, in order to draw specific conclusions for our future work. More generally, we intend this document to be used to promote debate on the role of training as part of a concerted attack on poverty and social exclusion. It is also designed to help deal with the " information crisis "-the paucity of good quality data about the provision of training to the poor and its impact on their employment and incomes.