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Africa is seeing a renewed interest in technical and vocational skills development (TVSD). Before efficient youth employment policies can be set out and implemented for both urban and rural areas, however, reliable data and analysis must be available. This study will focus on TVSD. It aims to present a survey of the TVSD-related research conducted by various stakeholder groups over the course of the past 20 years, while also identifying the research expectations, needs and demands expressed by those stakeholders and ascertaining which research topics are in most urgent need of attention. This paper is based on three case studies carried out in Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. In addition, for the purposes of comparison and idea sharing, two similar studies were carried out in South Africa and Latin America. [The authors] also draw upon an analytical study of the situation in West Africa concerning research on education and training.

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This report revises recent studies about youth, education and employment, focusing on a particular sub-field. It specifically refers to the development of skills in youngsters in the area of formal education (mainly technical secondary school) as well as vocational training and training programmes. Within this sub-field, a more specific area has been separated: the one that refers to documents which examine the processes of development of policies and/or [skills development] SD programmes and their impact in a wider sense. It is mainly based on surveys of research/studies/consultancies which are available online. Approaches and findings from 70 papers in five countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay have been analysed and summarized as well as some papers which deal with several countries comparatively.

The report is structured as follows: first, the institutional contexts of elaboration of the selected corpus and the predominant subjects, are identified; second, follows a summary of some important findings of these studies; third, considering separately the body of assessments and the academic research, are analyzed and linked the approaches, contexts and their relations with the policies and intervention programmes and finally, some conclusions are presented. The annexes include the list of publications revised and a summary of the trends in production in the five countries selected.

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