The project Putting Skills to Work: Skills, Livelihoods and the Informal Sector (WGP21/1107) by Professor Lesley Powell (hereafter termed the SLIS project) is funded by the NIHSS Working Groups Programme. The NIHSS Working Groups Programme contributes to meeting the Institute’s Strategic Objective of “promoting the integrity, reputation and recognition of the humanities and social sciences within the higher education community, the science and technology community, and society.”
The Working Groups Programme is intended to give effect to the recommendations in the Charter for the Humanities and Social Sciences on the HSS entity that will fundamentally change the existing higher education landscape to make it more responsive to, and inclusive of, the HSS and its disciplinary particularities. These Working Groups are also aimed at ensuring the integrity and excellence of the HSS in South African higher education institutions.
The overall objective of the engaged scholarship SLIS project is to develop a scholarly community engaged in better understanding the education and training needs of post school youth who make their livelihoods (or parts thereof) working in the informal sector. The specific objective is to bring together scholars who work at the two ends of this challenge: the demand side (work as it is lived in the informal sector) and the supply side (skills development).
The SLIS project will do this through three subcomponents which aim to bring together scholarship that has hitherto been undertaken in disciplinary silos (economics, skills development, development studies and sociology) and which exists as small and underdeveloped bodies of scholarship. An important emphasis is to discern and develop theoretical lenses useful for better understanding the education and training skills needs of post school youth who make their livelihoods (or part thereof) in the informal sector.