The skills balancing act in sub-Saharan Africa: Investing in skills for productivity, inclusivity and adaptability
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The skills balancing act in sub‑Saharan Africa: Investing in skills for productivity, inclusivity and adaptability Omar Arias, David K. Evans and Indhira Santos. Agence française de développement and The World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019, 346 pp. Africa Development Forum series. ISBN 978-1-4648-1149-4 (pbk), 978-1-4648-1350-4 (eBook) Birger Fredriksen1
© UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This book is part of the “Africa Development Forum” series, jointly created in 2009 by the World Bank Group (WBG) and Agence française de développement (AFD) to “focus on issues of significant relevance to Sub-Saharan Africa’s social and economic development” (p. v). Two of the five studies published in 2018 and 2019 provide extensive analyses of education and training issues: Facing forward: Schooling for learning in Africa (Bashir et al. 2018),1 and the Skills balancing act study reviewed below. Both are excellent. They should be required reading for practitioners and policymakers working on such issues in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The titles of the skills study’s five chapters aptly describe its focus: (1) Skills and economic transformation; (2) Developing universal foundation skills; (3) Building skills for the school-to-work transition; (4) Building skills for productivity through higher education; and (5) Addressing skills gaps: continuing and remedial education and training for adults and out-of-school youth. Five aspects of the study’s comprehensive analysis are particularly noteworthy: First, it covers the skills needs of the whole economy rather than, as is often the case, focusing on the tiny modern sector, or, in World Economic Forum speak, on “4th Industrial Revolution Skills”. Because 80–90% of SSA’s labour force is engaged in the informal economy, the required accelerated economic transition and poverty reduction cannot be achieved without strong productivity growth in the informal economy, especially in agriculture (APP 2014; ACET 2017; AGRA 2018; 1 Bashir, S., Lockheed, M., Ninan, E., & Tan, J.-P. (2018). Facing forward: Schooling for learning in Africa. Washington, DC: Agence française de développement and World Bank. https://doi. org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1260-6.
* Birger Fredriksen [email protected] 1
Arlington, VA, USA
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AfDB 2018).2 While achieving this requires investments in many areas, massive skills upgrading is indispensable. Second, and related, this study examines the skills needs both of those already in the labour force as well as of future labour force entrants. Despite SSA’s impressive improved education access over the past two decades, the skills gap evident in comparison with other regions has increased. More than two-thirds of workers in SSA have not completed primary education, and more than 300 million have low, if any, literacy skills. Despite these alarming facts, the proportion of domestic and external financing dedicated to the monumental task of skills upgrading is negligible. Also, for the foreseeab
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