Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement

Introduction
Over the course of 2012, Results for Development Institute (R4D) worked with regional
partners in Africa and Asia to examine employer needs, explore existing curricula
systems, and identify existing innovative skills delivery models under the Innovative
Secondary Education for Skills Enhancement (ISESE) project. The resulting twelve
background studies include a broad reviews of issues related to skills, education, and
economic development in our 12 focus countries across Africa and Asia 1 . The two
reports presented here are a synthesis of key findings from this background research.
By 2030, the global labor force will reach 3.5 billion, and unless secondary education
enrollment doubles or triples, one billion of these workers will lack secondary
education, with 60 percent of these in South Asia and Africa. 2 While many countries
in these regions have raised secondary education as a priority, the explicit link between
secondary education and skills for employment is still absent in many national
education systems—a significant problem given the fact that most youth entering the
workforce will not obtain any education beyond the secondary level. In addition, an
increasingly interconnected global economy and rapid evolution of traditional labor
roles means that conventional ways of delivering skills for employment—for example,
traditional vocational training models—are becoming less relevant and responsive to
workforce demands. There is therefore an urgent need to reevaluate the skills needed
for employability in the 21st century economy, and to find innovative models to deliver
these skills to students.
Our research reveals that while technical and basic cognitive skills are still important in
the workplace, transferrable and non-cognitive skills such as communication, problemsolving,
punctuality, and flexibility are increasingly important, particularly for the
informal economy. Improving pedagogy is also central to increasing youth employability
in developing countries. Key features of models that successfully deliver these critical
skills include an emphasis on multi-stakeholder partnerships, updated pedagogy, and
innovative financing mechanisms to improve access, quality and relevance of skills at the
secondary level.
Effective skills development policies and approaches can be instrumental in equipping
youth with the skills and competencies needed to find and maintain employment
in today’s dynamic labor environment. However, questions remain about how to
methodically classify these new and important sets of skills, identify successful ways
of imparting them, and most importantly, what resources are needed to scale-up these
models to create the most impact on youth employability in the developing world today.
Nick Burnett
Managing Director
R4D
1 The ISESE background studies can be found on R4D’s website: http://resultsfordevelopment.org/knowledge-center/innovative-secondary-education-skillsenhancement-isese-phase-i-research
2 The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people. McKinsey Global Institute, June 2012.
Skills for Employability in Africa and Asia 1