Skills for development: a new approach to international cooperation in skills development?

Abstract Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) was a central tool of development cooperation from the 1950s through to the 1980s. However, with the rise of education for all in the 1990s, TVET ‘fell from grace ’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a growing interest among development cooperation agencies in the importance of skills development, a broader concept that has come to replace TVET in agency thinking. This article considers the ways in which work and employment have changed in the last decade or so across the South, and the challenges this brings for skills development. It then examines the nature of skills development in current agency formulations. Finally, it links these to the main elements of the changing overall trends in development cooperation and its implications for those involved in skills development work.