Vocational education, on-the-job training and labour market integration of young workers in urban West Africa

Abstract

Background paper prepared for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2012 “Youth and skills: Putting education to work”Using surveys covering seven West African economic capitals in the early 2000s, this paper describes the labour market integration of youth with regard to their level of formal education and to the type of vocational training they received. We particularly focus on the informal sector and look at activity rates, unemployment, earnings, job quality and small firm performance in order to identify the key features of youth labour market integration. To our knowledge, these features of Africa’s labour markets are rarely documented at a sectoral level using representative samples of urban areas. The overall results suggest that the youth are the most disadvantaged in terms of unemployment, access to the formal sector, and earnings. We provide some evidence that vocational education might be a good instrument for integrating the formal sector and that it is often more profitable than general education in terms of earnings and firm performance, especially at higher levels of schooling. Generally, education, especially at high levels, provides a substantial growth in earnings in informal jobs in most of the cities studied. Regarding the incidence of vocational education and training (VET), the main form observed is traditional apprenticeship. Overall, young workers without any formal VET are the more disadvantaged in terms of working conditions, while workers who benefited from a traditional apprenticeship in a small firm occupy an intermediate position. Apprenticeship training for young workers seems to be fairly prevalent in the informal sector, but the associated working conditions are bad, and kinship ties seem to be there a crucial channel for training access