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Home-based work is considered a gendered phenomenon as an overwhelming majority of home-based workers comprises women. Despite the fact that millions of women in Pakistan are engaged in home-based work, they are not recognized as workers in national labor laws and are deprived of social protection and other facilities available to workers in formal economy. This research examines socioeconomic problems faced by the women workers, the ways they negotiate those problems, and how vocational education affects their lived experiences. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with home-based women workers in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the study showed that home-based work is considered appropriate for women because it does not require them to compromise their primary roles as mothers and caregivers for their families. As the home-based work remains un-regularized and outside the radar of labor policies, the women workers faced severe human insecurities, including economic insecurity, shelter insecurity, and health insecurity. Formal vocational training helped the women to enhance their skills according to the market trend and get awareness about the market price of their work.

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Actor network theory (ANT) is used to explore how work-learning is enacted in informal online communities and illustrates how researchers might use sociomaterial approaches to uncover complexities, uncertainties, and specificities of work-learning practices. Participants in this study were self-employed workers. The relational and material aspects of work-learning, along with notions of the workspace of the self-employed as hybrid, distributed, and shifting, are considered. This study then examines the work that web-technologies, such as postings, do as they are entangled in an array of networks. Far from being singular objects unified in function, form, or effect, the posting provides multiple entry points for exploring online work-learning practices. The informal learning enacted in this study was the effect of multiple networks and attempts to stabilize fluidity. Different associations with knowledge and novel ways of knowing were also enacted, although there are contradictions between Web 2.0 rhetoric and the practices of these self-employed workers. Findings suggest that practitioners and researchers should not be too quick to paint work-learning practices in online communities, or even the notion of online community, with a broad brush.

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Women around the world often perform jobs with minimal skill requirements, and encounter few opportunities for learning and advancement. Governments and development agencies try to improve women's skills through vocational and business training programmes. The primary objective of this systematic review, based on a search executed in September 2016, is to synthesize the evidence on the effects of vocational and business training programmes that aim to improve women's labour market outcomes. The secondary objective is to improve our understanding of the barriers to and facilitators of vocational and business training effectiveness for women, and how these barriers and facilitators operate.

The review highlights several important implications for practice and policy. The quantitative evidence suggests that vocational training had positive but small effects on employment, formal employment, and earnings. In addition, the review found that business training combined with other programme components had positive effects on self-employment, as well as small but positive effects on sales and profits. However, these relatively small effects may be insufficient to justify scaling up vocational or business training programmes. The review found some evidence of a positive relationship between the effects of vocational training programmes and the inclusion of a stronger gender focus, life skills training, or an internship in addition to the vocational training. These results suggest that including a gender focus, life skills training, or internships could strengthen vocational training programmes. However, it is important to test these mechanisms further through rigorous mixed-methods studies with multiple treatment arms.

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This article examines workers’ learning in the context of the worker as the employer. It draws from a qualitative study focusing on Canadian women who had left jobs in organisations to start their own business, often with little business experience and education. Both, cultural sites where women entrepreneurs struggle to win a space for themselves as well as where they don’t struggle and may have been manipulated to take up positions they would not otherwise have chosen are identified. Five themes that are seen as significant sites of struggle among women’s narratives of their entrepreneurial lives, learning and subjectivity are outlined. These are: business plans make a business; business is profit and growth; business is a tough frontier; business is women’s self-determining adventure; and women’s (other) work. The article concludes by discussing pedagogical entry points for educators to empower women. Show less

Growth in self-employment and freelance work has been substantial, both in UK and internationally, since the economic downturn of 2008. Research focuses on workers within the performing and visual arts sub sector of the creative industries (the majority of whom work freelance) to examine the range of skills required to work within these industries, how such skills are developed and constantly renewed, and the ways in which work is sourced and sustained within the context of freelance and self employment. Findings suggest that 'working to get work' plays a significant part in the day-to-day life of creative freelancers. This is achieved through personal and professional skills development, networking, and a facility in ways of working characterized by flexibility, adaptability, project working and resilience. It is suggested that findings could have applicability beyond the creative and cultural sector, in fact in all sectors that rely on increasing numbers of freelance workers.

Published abstract.

The volume from which this paper is taken is available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 138.635. Show less

The primary aim of the project was to determine how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise, and with it, the larger relationship between public and private spheres. A key research question was: what are the 'self-making' skills required to succeed in this competitive environment? Specifically, the research sought to: Identify the attitudes, knowledge and skills required to develop and run a sustainable creative micro-enterprise, including the acquisition of making/production skills, business skills and acumen, personal capacities and decision-making around self-marketing; Analyse the spatial and temporal negotiations necessary to run an online creative micro-enterprise, including the ways in which divisions of labour are gendered; and Examine how the contemporary creative economy contributes to growing ethics-based micro-economic consumer and producer relationships that privileges small-scale production, environmentally-sustainable making practices and the idea of buying direct from the maker.

The project focused on the contemporary craft and designer-maker micro-economy, which is at present experiencing unprecedented growth as part of the larger upsurge of interest in making as a cultural and economic practice. This research project has generated new insights into the changing nature of contemporary creative work, and both the tacit and explicit knowledge that individuals require to succeed as makers.

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Stepping Stones is a Brotherhood of St. Laurence micro-enterprise program developed in 2011 for women from refugee, migrant and asylum-seeking backgrounds living in Melbourne. It aims to help women achieve financial wellbeing by increasing their knowledge of starting a business, building skills to support micro-enterprise development and expanding their social and support networks. In 2017, funding was received from Ecstra Foundation to pilot a new model, Stepping Stones to Small Business. Delivered by a partnership comprising Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Now to Launch and BSL Youth Programs, this new model had a sharper focus on enhancing participants' financial literacy. It comprised four components: (1) Empowerment Pathways training to develop personal and business goals; (2) MoneyMinded training to increase financial literacy skills; (3) small business training to enhance related expertise; and (4) post-program support to connect each participant to a suitable mentor, and to facilitate access to local markets, information sessions and business-related workshops.

This study of Stepping Stones to Small Business found that: (a) financial literacy training can positively inform money management choices but information alone does not guarantee financial wellbeing; (b) personal experiences, social relationships, cultural norms and values shaped how the women viewed money; (c) the women preferred practical and interactive business training activities to cater for different learning styles; (d) for those who are locked out of mainstream employment, micro-enterprise can generate some income to help make ends meet, but the road to business viability is rocky; (e) women at different stages of business development have different mentoring needs; (f) well-defined partnerships offer mutual benefits; and (g) a strengths-based gender- and culturally responsive approach suited women.

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MEDA Maroc's 100 Hours to Success program provides Moroccan youth with 100 hours of training in basic life skills, entrepreneurship skills and financial management skills, with the aim of improving young peoples' chances to either enter wage employment or start their own business. The program helps to fill gaps between skills gained in school and the demands of the labour market. The program aims to provide youth with a stronger foundation on which to make the transition from school to work or to establish their own businesses, in a country where youth unemployment rates are fairly high and where the effort to secure one's first job can take up to two years.

The goal of this evaluative study is to assess the net gains that accrue to beneficiaries and whether participants have demonstrably improved outcomes in terms of employment and self-employment. As such, the study will seek to quantify differences between participants and a comparable group of non-participants in regard to employment and entrepreneurship activity following the program, including not only rates of activity but duration of job search (and/or business start-up), wages and income, and various aspects of job quality. The study also analysed the potential impact of the program on employability, including issues of self-efficacy, confidence, perception of abilities in regard to various soft skills, and attainment of more tangible skills related to language and computer usage. Finally, the analysis investigated potential improvements in savings behaviour and the ability of beneficiaries to manage finances, whether at the personal or business level. In analysing each of the above issues, [the authors] are mindful of potential differential outcomes in regard to age, gender, educational attainment, familial income and urban/rural residence.

Excerpts from publication.

Organised by the International Labour Organization in partnership with Silatech, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the Arab Urban Development Institute, the symposium, held on 6-8 March 2014 in Doha, brought together policy makers and practitioners with academics and researchers to present and discuss the evidence base for 'what works' in increasing the employment and productivity of youth. Discussants shared recent findings of impact evaluations from the Middle East and North Africa region and other developing regions. Participants were also introduced to evidence from systematic and literature reviews which are important for evidence based policy creation. This report was one of the background documents to the symposium. Show less

This paper empirically examines the relationship between the self-identity as Indigenous and earnings inequality in the Mexican labor market. Using Mexican Census data and a large set of wage covariates reveals the existence of an earnings penalty for self-identification as Indigenous. There is an additional and larger penalty for Indigenous persons who are fluent in an Indigenous language, regardless of Spanish language fluency. Further analyses using the Mexican Family Life Survey reveal that these earnings gaps persist after [the authors] also control for an individual's cognitive ability. Ethno-linguistic inequality is particularly strong in smaller cities and among self-employed workers.

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Social reproduction is the highest for self-employed as shown by an extensive literature from developed and developing countries. Very few studies however document the reason for this high intergenerational correlation of the self-employed status. The rare studies that have been done concern the US and show that children of self-employed benefit from an advantage when they are themselves self-employed. The purpose of this paper is to test if the second-generation of self-employed has an advantage related to the first-generation in the African context. It aims at highlighting the debate on firms heterogeneity in the informal sector, and seeks to contribute to understand the intergenerational transmission of inequalities. Using 1-2-3 surveys collected in the commercial capitals of seven West African countries in 2001-2002, this paper shows that the second-generation of informal self-employed does not have better outcomes than the first one, except when they choose a familial tradition in the same sector of activity. Thus, in the African context, having a self-employed father does not provide any advantage in terms of profit or sales and is not sufficient for the transmission of valuable skills. On the other hand, informal entrepreneurs who have chosen a specific enterprise based on familial tradition have a competitive advantage. Their competitive advantage is partly explained by the transmission of enterprise-specific human capital, acquired through experiences in the same type of activity and by the transmission of social capital.

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