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Skills development remains on the international development agenda but fails to get adequate attention. Based on prolonged fieldwork with a particularly marginalised community of children and young adults in the northern Nigerian state of Kano, this article shows how in contexts of extreme poverty the demand for skills training can supersede that for basic education. Further, by drawing on results of a six-month-long skill-training intervention, the article documents the scope for increased experimentation in the delivery of low-cost community-based skill-training programmes and identifies factors that influence programme completion. It also demonstrates that participation in skill-training programmes can dramatically increase entrepreneurial aspirations among marginalised youth, but that without access to credit most fail to pursue their aspirations. Below certain poverty thresholds, the dire resource constraints make change in aspirations an unreliable predictor of possible improvement in future outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using detailed micro-data on social relations and networks from rural Bangladesh, this paper examines the social determinants of children's schooling in a developing country. We employ a comprehensive set of controls for parental sociability and NGO membership as proxies for family social capital. We find no evidence that parental sociability bolsters child outcomes as inputs in the educational production function or indirectly via boosting maternal social knowledge, which is an important predictor of children's educational status. On the other hand, the effect of maternal social knowledge prevails even when we additionally control for neighbourhood-level unobservables and maximum education level of the household. To be precise, we find no evidence to suggest that 'social' parents are 'better' parents: social knowledge endowment of mothers is not related to their sociability. Rather, educated parents and those with higher unobserved taste for child quality have better social knowledge irrespective of their sociability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]