Technical skills were needed when Helvetas and its partners started to support rural development in the 1950s. Out of this emerged a long-lasting involvement in the development of the vocational skill training sector in Nepal.

Income generation from skill and employment

·       Rural people can get access to relevant skills for employment through mobile training focused on short-term, practical training. The SKILL project has achieved 50-70% full or part-time employment for more than 3000 rural people trained over the last years. This approach needs to reach out to many more people over the next years as an increasing number of young people enter the job market. The franchising of the SKILL-approach and its training packages is an innovative opportunity to address the challenge under F-SKILL. An outcome-based financing modality is used which pays the franchisees of F-SKILL not for training but for people put at work.

·   Employment and self-employment can be enhanced, income of poor households can be increased, the quality of services can be improved and rural-urban linkages can be strengthened through practical training, coaching and access to services for micro- and mini-enterprises following a business approach. Initial experiences over the past 3 years with the ELAM project are positive and there is an opportunity to benefit many more people in district towns and peri-urban areas. Therefore, a new project, Elam-plus has been initiated in 2004 with the objective to provide an effective and efficient support to the establishment and/or strengthening of mico- and mini-enterprises and to strengthen rural-urban linkages in the Mid and Far-West Region. 

Education

·     Classes on non-formal education (NFE) are more successful if these are well targeted as functional literacy within a development project. Thus, NFE is an integral part of agricultural projects, saving and credit projects or road building projects with a direct linkage to the respective utility of learning.

·       The institutionalization of experiences from projects can be promoted through the integration of learning into the curricula of the formal training institutions. For example, the standards on trail bridge building developed with support by TBSSP are now integrated into curricula of technical schools, while the experiences with insect-pathogenic fungi through the Biological Control Project are now part of the curriculum at the agricultural university at Rampur.

·     Sessions on HIV/AIDS prevention are integrated in most training activities in particular for migrant labour.