This document addresses the critical role that skills development can play in efforts to reduce poverty and promote pro-poor development. It presents an outline of various concepts, approaches, and strategies found within the field. “What is poverty?” and “How do we eradicate it?” are the central questions addressed by this document. While Work in Progress does not directly relate to disaster risk management (DRM) or disaster risk reduction (DRR), it does provide important information on various methods of poverty reduction, a necessary component of effective DRR. This is particularly the case considering the relationship between poverty and disaster risk, with the poor being amongst the most susceptible to disaster. Its most profound contribution to the poverty reduction discourse is that it goes beyond the economic definition of poverty to include political, human, protective, and socio-cultural dimensions. While the present pro-poor growth approach only focuses on improving the incomes of the poor, the authors support a more comprehensive approach, a pro-poor development approach that goes beyond the income-based definition of poverty to include measures of “health, education, vulnerability, voicelessness and powerlessness” (p. 2). The report also notes that the poor are a heterogeneous group facing different contexts, causes, and manifestations of poverty. The chapters on skills development prove rather insightful, noting that the expansion of Universal Primary Education (UPE) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) have not come to fruition due to inadequate resources and tensions between education and poverty reduction paradigms. In order to achieve poverty reduction, skills development responses need to be multifaceted, incorporating formal, informal, and non-formal dimensions. In all, the report provides a comprehensive analysis of poverty reduction, presents real life examples of the methodologies they support, while supplying an outline of how to measure the impact of pro-poor development approaches. The document specifically calls for moving away from a qualifications-oriented paradigm, towards one that focuses on a broader conception of skills. It considers a proper skills development framework one that involves a mixture of formal, informal, and non-formal skills development, given the inadequacy of the formal sector in most developing countries; one that focuses on the concrete and tangible needs of the poor.
Development
Poverty