The UN’s Agenda 2030, Transforming our world, 2015, aspires to cross-sectoral, cross-SDG, and genuinely cross-country approaches to education and skills for sustainable development. Unlike the MDGs, the goals and targets of... [ view full abstract ]
The UN’s Agenda 2030, Transforming our world, 2015, aspires to cross-sectoral, cross-SDG, and genuinely cross-country approaches to education and skills for sustainable development. Unlike the MDGs, the goals and targets of the SDG agenda are for ‘developed and developing countries alike’. However, there is little acknowledgement in this new agenda that there are very substantial labour market differences between and within countries. The ambitions of SDG 4 on Education also pay no cross-sectoral attention to SDG8 on Economic Growth, Employment and Work.
Even within individual SDGs, there are disjunctions between the language of the goal and its targets on the one hand and that of the global and thematic indicators on the other. In respect of technical and vocational skills, mentioned in three SDG4 targets, the global indicators minimise the targets’ ambitions for skills development, and just focus on ICT skills. Arguably, the crucial SDG4 target 4.7, on ’knowledge and skills’ for sustainable development, has indicators which primarily focus on all levels of education rather than including technical and vocational skills and capabilities.
Surprisingly, the Global Education Monitoring Report 2016, despite its powerful cross-sectorality, focuses more on soft skills than on technical and vocational skills, not recognising the essential synergy between these capabilities.
Equally, within SDG8, the language on ‘full and productive employment and decent work for all’ and on youth not in education and employment (NEET) neglects working conditions and capabilities in the massive informal economies of the world.
The paper critically explores these tensions from new research in India and in China on how Agenda 2030 has already engaged with these challenges in their national planning and policies of skills development, but also how this Agenda has begun significantly to influence skills development within both countries’ development cooperation programmes, particularly for Africa.
