National qualifications frameworks (NQFs) are meant to act as a translation device to make national qualifications more readable across countries, promoting workers’ and learners' mobility. Developing NQFs has become an important field of development cooperation. However, different actors contest on pros and cons of NQFs and strongly disagree in their appraisal.
NQFs shall facilitate competency orientation in education and training, lifelong learning and mutual recognition of competencylevels in the framework of labour migration. National governments and donor organisations have dominated the development of NQFs so far. This bears the riskof creating artificial and academic competency profiles in VSD, detached from the world of work. Participatory approaches incorporating organisations of the world of work are more promising in terms of producing NQFs relevant to the labour market needs that foster employability.
Consider the introduction texts from Markus Maurer and SDCs NVQF tool (2016) for a start into the topic.