Dr Brigitte Piquard

This article presents findings from the Upskilling for Future Generations Project (Gen-Up), a participatory, collaborative project designed with and for young women in Cameroon and Sierra Leone to understand the links between technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and sustainable employment. The aim of the project is to provide a model of gender mentoring that can help communities to challenge gender stereotypes and to empower young women to build careers in male-dominated labour sectors. The article calls for a deeper, gender-just understanding of ‘skills’ necessary to fulfil the United Nations’ ‘decent work’ goals in the context of deepening urban inequality and gender discrimination. The article situates gender at the centre of future TVET policy, arguing that without a gender-just and gender-sensitive approach, skills programming will continue to have limited success in rebalancing patriarchal and discriminatory labour markets.

Despite decades of focus on gender and skills training, the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa remains deeply gendered and rooted in wider structures of patriarchal inequality and exploitation. Engaging with recent theoretical moves toward gender-transformative and gender-just TVET programming, this paper explores how a gradual revisioning of TVET can be mobilised to challenge broader gender inequality and discrimination in precarious settings. Bringing together insights from feminist scholarship and the UN’s decent work agenda, which seeks to align fair and secure working conditions with the aspirations of workers, we ask what a gender-transformative future for TVET might look like where labour rights, sustainable livelihoods and wellbeing are incorporated from the ground up. Drawing on findings from Cameroon and Sierra Leone, from the innovative ‘Gen-Up’ project which aims to investigate possible gender-responsive TVET programmes and policies in collaboration with the TVET provider, the Don Bosco network we ask what is both possible and permissible in the fractious economic climate, where the focus on basic survival and income generation inhibits a genuine challenge to
entrenched gender norms and stereotypes. For young women especially whose aspirations are multiply damaged by persistent discriminatory frameworks and who become further vulnerable at times of economic and social crisis, we ask whether current TVET programming is helping them escape the multiple forms of
marginalisation they face. Even in cases where women may be portrayed as successful entrepreneurs or achieving sustainable livelihoods, the evidence suggests these individualistic narratives are leaving many young women behind. In this context of instability, precarity and increasing global and local socio-economic and gender inequalities we argue that only holistic TVET programming based on social and moral values and empowerment and proposing diverse pathways to decent work, creating forms of solidarity, collaboration and a contextualised enabling environment can act as both a lever for gender transformation and also an engine for broader socio-economic change fitting the ‘Decent Work’ vision and a constantly changing world of work.

Sound decision-making in protracted conflict isdependent on the quality and the relevance of the information available and the knowledge produced. Despite the fact that gaps in humanitarian knowledge are common, local humanitarian knowledge is rarely taken into consideration and for political, structural and social reasons, not visible and valued. The paper examines if and how the complementarity of different forms of humanitarian knowledge can reduce existing gaps as well as power imbalances embedded in the humanitarian system. Based on a case study of local humanitarian NGOs’ knowledge production in the Central African Republic, the paper identifies the specificities of local humanitarian knowledge constructed through social consensus, using different information flows and responding to various interests, needs and expectations. It argues that a better understanding of the local humanitarian knowledge, its production, and the collaboration through co-production of knowledge will strengthen sense making and relevance of contextualised humanitarian responses.

conflict settings, symbolic violence affects populations and on their perception of place, lifestyle and culture. It also looks at the potential of space and place-making to enhance conflict transformation and resilience by strengthening the sense of place and symbolic reparation. In extreme environments, symbolic violence has become a means of actively imposing social or symbolic domination which can be challenged by community-based peace-building and place-making initiatives.