I was interested to read Canadian International Development Assistance Minister Julian Fantino’s big policy speech last week. It made headlines for its apparent dissing of aid groups and its lauding of the potential role of the private sector (which, big shock, is not universally popular in international development circles), but what I found intriguing was the way it emphasized human resource development as a focus of future Canadian policy.

The specific example Fantino used was a string of vocational and technical schools Canada is setting up in the Caribbean. I know zilch about this particular initiative, but I do know that technical and vocational education is in a pretty rotten state in most developing countries. It’s usually of low quality and there is little demand for it.

It’s a chicken and egg problem: pretty much every post-colonial society has grown up with the idea that leaders go to university. As a result, everyone wants their kid to go to university despite the fact that curriculum is often brutally out-of-date, having changed disturbingly little since the British (or French, or whoever) left fifty years ago. If you really want to blow your mind, check out figure 13 in this recent OECD report – in virtually every African country, unemployment among university graduates is much higher than it is among primary school graduates.

Despite this, demand for universities continues to increase, often at the expense of demand for vocational education. Part of the reason is that vocational education simply isn’t very good in most developing countries; but even where the standard isn’t terrible (Ghana, for instance), the vocational institutes are having trouble hanging on to students.

The standard of vocational education in these countries does need to rise, but without an image make-over that won’t accomplish much. Your average conservative policy thinker assumes that students will go where the money is, but that’s simply not true; often, what students pursue is prestige, which in the developing world is synonymous with a university degree (even if that means unemployment). What’s needed is to raise the prestige of vocational education.

That’s something Canadians know more about than most. Over the past two decades, polytechnics like NAIT, BCIT, Humber, etc., have really improved the perception of applied post-secondary by updating the notion of what it means to be applied. In Africa, one of the best development projects any country could undertake would be to build and maintain a truly modern polytechnic that could act as a continent-wide beacon of VET reform and start a move away from universities on the continent.

If the new Conservative development policy leads us in that direction, then it will be a very good thing indeed.