Financing vocational training in Africa. Case study on five Vocational Training Funds

The present study was launched by the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs as a complement to the AFD (French Development Agency) study on mechanisms for funding vocational training, in order to compare various vocational training funds in terms of their status, their objectives, the financial circuits and modes of organization, implementation and management involved, and the reasons for their success or failure. Funds of three main kinds were studied here: i) South Africa's integrated development fund, ii) Tunisia's dual development fund, and iii) the global fund for education in sub-Saharan African. It has emerged from this study that these funds contribute to structuring vocational training, and that the social partners are consistently involved, although their role is too often a purely consultative one, that the procedures involved in applying for funding need to be simplified, and that these funds are in need of experts to identify the needs and vocational training providers to organize suitable responses. All these findings raise questions about these vocational training funds, in terms of: the distribution and nature of the actual powers of the public, private and social partners involved; whether the taxes collected are really spent on continuing vocational training; the incidence of external aid on the missions to which funds are allocated; the various modes of access of the beneficiaries of the funding; the distribution of resources between the ""modern"" and ""informal"" sectors; the shift from a supply-based approach to one focusing more on the economic and social needs.