Daily Times

When I was doing research on the textiles sector in Pakistan more than a decade ago, lack of adequately skilled labour and low human capital came up again and again. I developed an interest in skills development since then and it is worthwhile to explore this issue again. In addition to low skills, there is need to address weak labour protection and rights. We will do so separately in the future.

In terms of skills development, Amjad et. al. (2005) adequately argue that if Pakistan has to compete in the global economy, it must graduate from ‘cottonomics’ to more knowledge and technology based production. Pakistan must move away from ‘low-skills trap’ to produce higher value added goods. Our manufacturing sector cannot compete on the basis of low-skills competence. If not reversed, this trend leads to a process of deindustrialization.

Some broad picture of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector’s output in producing a skilled labour force in the literature (Ansari and Wu 2013; World Bank 2012; Cheema 2014; Pakistan Economic Survey 2017-18) is revealing and we present this broad-brush bird’s-eye view. There are 3.8 thousand TVET institutes with the enrollment of 345 thousands trainees. However, TVET learners are only 3 percent of overall students in Pakistan. In terms of working age population, two-fifths of them have had no education and less than 1.4 percent of working population were enrolled in TVET institutes in the past, a trend that might not have changed in a significant way in the following years.

With education expenditure to be 2.2 percent of GDP in the FY 2017; skills development budget was less than 1 percent of education budget of Punjab a few years ago. National average might be similar. It reflects low priority placed on skills development. Women labour force participation is very low and there are huge disparities between the urban versus rural, gender and sectoral divides. Skills and education deficit is much higher in high poverty districts of Pakistan.

Access to skills training is difficult for the working age population of Pakistan. Cost of accessing trainings is high and for women, low mobility adds to their access issues

Pakistan needs to create 1.5 million new jobs every year to maintain unemployment at existing level. Unemployment could rise as high as 20 percent in 2020. In the past, almost two-thirds of jobs were created on the basis of self-employment and by household enterprises that have low productivity. CERP-PEOP conducted a baseline household survey on this issue some years back. Nearly two-fifths of enterprises employing multi-workers shared difficulty in finding job-related skills as a source of problem for their business.

There is need to identify the causes behind this abysmal performance of TVET. Insightful paper by Ali Cheema (2014) building on World Bank 2012 publication provides useful learning markers and we summarize these lessons below. There is dearth of supply of quality TVET in Pakistan. The supply-side failure of skills market needs to be addressed to overcome very narrow base of skills provision.

Access to skills training is difficult for the working age population of Pakistan. Cost of accessing trainings is high and for women, low mobility adds to their access issues. The current TVET programmes generally require middle to high education as part of pre-qualification criteria that automatically excludes the vulnerable poor who have had no or less education. It is “self-defeating” design feature of present skills programmes. Therefore, there is need to build in basic literacy and numeracy as part of skills training to overcome access issues for the vulnerable poor and these life skills are also desired by the employers.

Additionally, the current TVET programmes focus on enrollment instead of successful job placement of TVET graduates that would ensure a good return to their acquisition of skills. There is need to build-in market linkage, placement of jobs and earnings as an essential design component of TVET. Linking skills training to assets transfer and micro-credit adds more value as it would make such efforts more integrated. There is need for on-the-job training as well as active labour market programmes to make skills trainings more useful.

It is not possible to revamp the skills trainings and make them outcome-based unless the irrelevant and outdated TVET syllabus is not revised, resource constraints and poor infrastructure is not addressed and greater exposure to industry and alignment between the demand and supply of skills market is not taken into account.

One way out of enrollment focused TVET is to work on ‘performance-based financing’ or providing training vouchers to targeted trainees who can then select appropriate and relevant providers from the public or private sector. Combining skills training with the provision of social services such as health services, family planning and childcare can well complement community development and also help to increase women’s labour force participation. There is also the need for skills training to focus on young adults of working population (15-29 years old) to deal with demographic challenge in Pakistan.

Issue of high dropouts of trainees enrolled in TVET programmes also needs to be addressed. The literature cited above also qualifies that completion rates for women fell by 6 percentage points by increasing one kilometer distance to the training centres as revealed in an impact evaluation. On the similar lines, arranging trainings in the neighbourhood of women households increased enrollment and rates of completion for women by 30 percentage points. It shows that women face acute mobility constraints and they need secure transportation and proximity to training arrangements.

National Education Policy Framework 2018 by the present government takes some of these issues on board regarding TVET. It is good to see that some of wisdom generated by scholarship is made relevant. However, there is need for more research output to be incorporated in the National Education Policy Framework. And of course the key to the puzzle lies in the implementation.

The writer is an Islamabad-based social scientist

Published in Daily Times, January 28^th 2019.