Short Abstract

Across Africa, TVET prioritises school-based models that are weakly aligned with local labour markets, knowledge systems, and young people’s aspirations. This panel examines how trades are learned across formal and non-formal settings, focusing on pedagogy and processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Long Abstract

Emphasis on education as a central pillar of knowledge society development, alongside commitments to universal free schooling, has reinformed the prioritisation of school-based education and training, including in the domain of technical and vocational skills. Globally, critiques of such provision have highlighted weak linkages with industry, limitations in teacher and instructor performance, and perceived mismatches between young people’s skills and aspirations, and the requirements of technical and professional trades. Yet in contexts where informal economic activity predominates, curriculum and standards development are often aspirational and insufficiently grounded in the institutional, social, and economic realities within which TVET providers, instructors, and learners exist.

This panel invites papers that examine components of the TVET ecosystem through diverse African perspectives illuminating how professional trades are learned, how school-based TVET is situated within local labour markets and knowledge systems, and how formal and non-formal modes of training intersect. Contributions addressing the technical, socio-economic, and cultural contexts of occupational learning, the pedagogical approaches employed, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion operating across different training environments are particularly encouraged.

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