Making TVET Providers Accountable: Ten Years of Hard Lessons at MCC

The changing nature of work is a key source of social and economic uncertainty in many societies, and the COVID-19 pandemic has both accelerated the changing structure of labor markets and elevated the stakes of active labor market policies. Where firms complain of challenges in hiring the workforce they need, policymakers often turn to TVET programs to try to produce more workers with more relevant skills. Yet recent research has posed difficult questions about these programs’ effectiveness in improving labor market outcomes. Donors are grappling with this evidence in their engagement with existing TVET systems as they aim to link education and training systems to ever-changing labor market demands.

Organized around a recent paper from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, this presentation will summarize MCC’s latest evidence on the effectiveness of its TVET programs and offer a theoretical framework for the sector based on other existing evidence. MCC will highlight the lessons from its first and second generations of TVET programs, leading into a discussion of ways the global development community can improve the design and delivery of future TVET programs.