• Background and Trouble Shooters Guide
• Micro-credit
• Skills training
• Leakage of benefits
• Excessive benefits
• Basic criteria for success

Skills training

Most programs for adolescent OVC include skills training to ease the transition off of charitable support and into employment and financial self-sufficiency. However, most skills training activities for OVC do not track their graduates to see whether they are employed in their area of training a year following graduation. The result is a lack of learning and self-correction. Moreover, many projects support the types of training most likely to fail (Johanson & Adams, Skills Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank: Washington, DC. 2004.)

Types of training that are most likely to fail:

• Training in providing services for which there is no international market: hairdresser, seamstress, running kiosks (because the market is limited, supply is large, and incomes marginal).
• Training in government-run vocational education schools.
• Training without employer commitment, student choice of vocation, or student contribution.

Types of training more likely to succeed:

• Training in production of goods and services for which there is an international market.
• Training when there is an advance employer commitment to hire.
• Apprenticeship in informal skills.
• Training within enterprises (of employees).

Also consider:

• Catch-up education in literacy and numeracy.
• Life-skills training.
• Entrepreneurship training.

Web sites on skills training:

The World Bank's site on vocational education and training