With Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) positioned as a key mechanism in transforming the employment landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa, ‘Sustainability’, and ‘Sustainable Livelihoods’ have been placed both at the heart of the ‘Decent Work’ agenda. Alongside these targets, many countries are aiming to make their job markets more gender equal by upskilling more women and girls through ambitious TVET programmes. Despite these laudable objectives, many young women in Sub-Saharan Africa remain excluded from access to education and training and access to decent work through a range of complex socio-economic issues, including entrenched patriarchal forms of discrimination and inequality of access to opportunities. Even when young women do graduate from TVET courses, they often remain trapped in precarious employment whilst being branded as ‘successful entrepreneurs’. In this chapter, we examine this disconnection between the narratives around informal employment, TVET, and gender in the lives of young female TVET trainees on the innovative ‘Gen-Up’ project, which aims to identify gender-transformative elements in TVET programmes and access to decent work. The project is developed in collaboration with the Don Bosco TVET centres and social protection works in Sierra Leone and Cameroon. As we show, the current TVET orthodoxy promotes a vision of skills training based on outdated pathways from formal education to formal employment drawn from the Global North, which fail to reflect the economic realities that many TVET graduates face when leaving their training courses. As we discuss, graduates face daunting levels of discrimination, exploitation and disappointment as they try to craft a ‘Sustainable Livelihood’ through decent work in increasingly fragmented African urban job markets where informality is the norm, income is intermittent and ‘Sustainable Livelihoods’ and ‘Decent Work’ are far-off objectives. Situating TVET in between these complex confluences of economic informality, personal struggle and the constricted possibilities presented by economic reality, we explore how connecting TVET more intimately to the possibility of ‘Decent Work’ incorporating labour rights, sustainable livelihoods, and new forms of employability and wellbeing might offer new ways of envisaging a gender-just ‘decent’ future for young women in Africa. © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Lesley Powell, Adam Cooper, Trent Brown and Simon McGrath; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
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