During the 1990s, I followed closely the activities of the World Bank in supporting technical and vocational education in Africa. As with many other areas of World Bank policy and practice, this powerful institution has had a major impact on TVET provision in many countries across the African continent. Like many others, I was quite critical of the Bank’s blanket policy prescriptions for this critically important area of training provision.  

Thirty years on, I thought it would be worthwhile to review the evolution of World Bank TVET policy and practice. In undertaking this review, I have focused on the following three closely related issues. Firstly, the nature and extent of the changes which have occurred with regard to the Bank’s TVET sector strategy and policy design, on the one hand, and policy practice based on the design and implementation of World Bank funded projects in SSA, on the other; Secondly, the key underlying reasons for these changes in organisational policy and practice; and thirdly, the degree of correspondence over time between Bank TVET policy and actual practice. 

The main finding of this review is that during the 1990s and up until the mid-late 2000s, there was a fairly close correspondence between the Bank’s clearly stated TVET reform strategy for SSA and the its subsequent practice both with respect to the overall size of the its TVET project portfolio and the design of individual projects at the country level. Since then, however, not only have the fundamental characteristics of Bank TVET projects changed quite dramatically but this has been accompanied by a growing disjuncture between this practice and the Bank’s policy pronouncements on TVET in Africa.

Read more my working paper 9