Youth, skills, and informal sectors in the Global South: theoretical and methodological lenses on learning and livelihoods

Education and training have largely failed to respond to the needs of those who generate livelihoods outside of the formal economy. Neglect of the informal sector is partly due to it eluding ‘legibility’: states generally only ‘see’ what can be measured and perceived to contribute to officially valued forms of economic activity, creating a formality bias. The illegibility of the informal sector is exacerbated under conditions of neoliberalism, as it often fails to conform to imperatives of productivism, forms of production in which paid employment is segregated from other aspects of life, with economic development and growth seen to be their main objective. Seeing like a neoliberal state therefore results in the neglect of informal modes of production, which are not seen to carry value. The formality bias is also evident in relation to vocational education and training (VET), with productivist assumptions underpinning VET as an institution that is oriented towards the needs of industry. Global South VET systems are rigid, unresponsive to changing local labour markets, and unable to adapt to the needs of the fast-changing informal sector. VET policy and practice utilised by international development agencies and individuals, as well as by national governments, has largely ignored or denigrated the informal sector. In this chapter, we try to challenge the view that the informal sector holds little value, showing the range of ways young people make a living in and beyond it and the role that education and training usefully plays or could play in supporting these endeavors. If scholarship is to assist in making education and training systems more responsive to the needs of the informal sector, this will require a rethink of dominant ways of theorizing and researching learning for livelihoods. There remains a need for deeper theorization of the skills needed for living in the world in relation to oneself, to others, and to the environment while being sensitive to the development of inclusive and sustainable economies.