RRD has been active in India doing an assessment of the impact of technical vocational education and training (TVET) together with a local consultant based in New Delhi. This TVET is being financed by three Dutch faith-based NGO’s and it was upon their request that this evaluation is done. RRD is part of a team led by ACE-Europe (www.ace-europe.be). The evaluation is also being conducted in Albania, Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Goals of the evaluation are: (1) to assess the results achieved of the of the TVET activities as supported by the Dutch NGO’s and executed by their partner organisations and (2) to give a judgement on the various strategies used by the partner organisations in the implementation of the TVET activities.
In India five projects have been investigated: a random sample of projects currently supported. Typical courses implemented appeared to be courses on computer hardware, computer software, electronics, air conditioning and refrigeration, cutting and tailoring, mobile repairing, beauty culture and textile designing.
Preliminary results indicate that TVET is an effective tool in the struggle against abject poverty:
For the vast majority of the students engaged in TVET in these projects, skills have been acquired that enable students to adequately respond to the demands of the labour market and that are to the capacity and interest of the students.
For the vast majority of students, guidance is available after training in finding a job also sometimes resources are made available to start one’s own business.
Over 90% of the ex-students are (self)employed. For the technical courses in most cases this concerns wage employment. For beauty parlour and tailoring courses this concerns for the most part self employment. This is associated with an average increase in income from € 15 to € 100 per month per individual.