Skills for Local Futures

For years, “skilling” has been sold as the answer to rural youth unemployment. But in practice, much of this training has prepared young people for low-level, dead-end jobs — security guards, delivery boys, bottom-of-the-pyramid tech — that offer poverty wages and little dignity. Our systems funnel rural youth into the narrowest possible pathways, with the least possibility for growth.

Most “skilling” programs treat young people as replaceable units of labour, not as learners with the capacity to shape their world. They prepare them to fit into a fragile economy, rather than to strengthen the places they come from.

There’s another way to think about skills — one that has two clear aims:

1. Building local prosperity: helping young people regenerate the communities and ecosystems they belong to.

2. Offering a path away from precarity: so they can step into the wider world on their own terms, with agency and dignity.

This is what I call skills for local futures.

The idea is quite simple: skills must make sense in the place they’re taught, while also looking ahead to the realities of the next twenty years — climate change, renewable energy, shifting tourism, circular economies. As the world gathers for COP30 to discuss adaptation and resilience, perhaps the most meaningful climate action will begin not in global declarations, but in small, local classrooms where young people learn to work with the land and each other.

The goal isn’t to create workers who fit into today’s low-wage slots, but to cultivate people who can regenerate landscapes, install solar grids, host travellers with care, or build enterprises around repair and reuse.

Imagine a young person mapping a watershed using GIS and then spending a season building contour trenches that manage surface water runoff. Or another who learns to install rooftop solar panels, reducing the village’s dependence on unreliable grids. Or a family that transforms their home into a farmstay, offering visitors both hospitality and a glimpse of sustainable living. These are not fantasies — they are real, concrete livelihoods that strengthen both community and planet.

The training journey itself can be a kind of rite of passage: beginning with listening to the land and people, moving into short hands-on labs, apprenticing on live projects, and finally stepping into one’s own micro-enterprise. At its heart, this is learning as participation — not instruction — where knowledge grows through doing, belonging, and caring for a place.

The outcome is not just “placement” but confidence, creativity, and the possibility of staying rooted or moving outward — on one’s own terms.

What might our rural futures look like if skills training became about resilience and regeneration, not just exit routes into low-wage work? Perhaps the real measure of a skills mission is not how many youth we send away, but how many choose to stay — to restore soil, water, and meaning where they stand.