Microcosms of the Skills Ecosystem: Building Communities of Practice (CoPs) to Tackle Food Insecurity and Youth Unemployment in Northern Mozambique

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

At the beginning, the article explains the need for a holistic approach just skills development at the beginning of the article, with reference being made to a Social Ecosystem Model (SEM) on skills that links working living and learning.  At the same time, the authors point to the need. for the elaboration of the SEM in the context of the global South, reflecting the thinking of the Africa VET 4.0 Collective that has extensively utilised this perspective on skills development in the sub-Saharan African context.  I think this elaboration is necessary if the SEM is to be elaborated in different national and global contexts.

 

Following the contextual introduction, there is an interesting addition to the social ecosystem literature concerning the development of communities of practice (COPs) as ‘microcosms of skills ecosystems’ that can experiment in knowledge production using ‘participatory action research’ (PAR).  Arguments for this participatory perspective and research approach is rooted in the complex problem of food and security and lack of formal employment in the Mozambique context.  The theoretical elaboration of COPs in the SEM model is also important, given that the model thus far has placed more emphasis on the mediating role of institutions and local governance between national systems and individual practitioners and students.

 

In the methodology section the PAR approach is justified through the contextualisation of the problem being investigated in the Mozambican context.  This contextualisation of the methodology is a particularly strong feature of this part of the article.

 

A review of the processes of building COPs in three locations is reported in the results section which describes in detail the developments and deliberations of each of the COPs, linked to the problems of young people exploring their own solutions.

 

The contextualisation of the Mozambican national situation takes place at the beginning of the discussion section and the function of the COPs is related to this in a long descriptive section.

 

The article returns to the SEM towards the end (lines 592-6).  However, if the COP discussion is to make a significant contribution to the development of the SEM in both the Global South and North, this late section requires further development.  For example, VET 4.0 analysis has pointed to the problems of weak skills institutions in the Global South and allied work (e.g. Muhangi) has pointed to the importance of ‘mediation’ within the Social Ecosystem Model.  So the point here is whether COPs can be supported and join with other mediating forces (institutions) so that they can become ‘permanent’.  Otherwise, the risk is that they ‘come and go’.  Or are they meant to operate in their own ‘bubble of freedom’ with all the attendant risks?  In summary, I think more should be made of the COP dimension of SEM and if this requires that some material has to be removed for word count purposes, there is room for some reduction in the amount of contextual description.

Author Response

We have addressed all the comments in the word document attached here.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article consists in an interesting report and discussion on a capacity building project in northern Mozambique. It is original and well-written but the general structure of the article could be improved and I would suggest making the following changes:

• the methods section needs to be improved. In particular, the place and role of the authors in the project need to be better described and problematized. Similarly, more detail need to be provided on data collection, or on the selection of interviewees.
• the beginning of the discussion (l. 383-430) on the history of VET in Mozambique to the introduction would be better placed in the introduction, which is currently a somewhat dry discussion. The article would be much more compelling if the introductory section included this broader historical context.
• the presentation of the results could be very much improved: The current format (presenting the activities CoP by CoP) leads to some repetitions, which could be avoided by framing them by theme instead (agriculture, sustainability, entrepreneurship, etc.). Additionally, to improve clarity, i would suggest the authors to create a table summarizing the various activities, their goals and their level of success, in addition to the text.
• Finally, on l.131, it would be good to briefly discuss the issues mentioned.

I conclude with a few minor additional corrections:

• l.88: the acronym isn't introduced, but it is instead on l.122
• l.114: "it" doesn't refer to anything (it should refer to "food insecurity"). Revise the sentence
• l.143: "being" is a bit ackward
• l.164: "take some distance" maybe?
• l.202: replace "thanks to" with "due to" for a more neutral approach
• l.219: check the syntax

Author Response

We have addressed the reviewer's comments in the word file attached here. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf