Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) prepares people for professions that are non-academic and directly related to a trade, occupation or vocation.
It may involve initial training for beginners as well as further, career-long training for the workforce at school, at specialized training centers and in the workplace. More and more attention has been dedicated to TVET sector for its important role in the fight against poverty; it in fact cannot only provide the possibility to reach a sustainable economic development, by giving the opportunity to a decent and better job, but it can also provide basis for a life-long learning in favor of a much wider improvement in the overall quality of life.

The Italian Development Cooperation, in the framework of the Millennium Development Goals, has embraced, together with several other international agencies and under the lead of UNESCO, the six guiding principles to achieve “Education for All” (EFA) outlined during the World Education Forum held in 2000 in Dakar.

One of these goals is to “ensure that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes” (Goal 3). It is clear that TVET is an essential component of such programmes, since it is one of the providers of learning and life-skills programmes for young people and adults. Moreover, as the labor market becomes more specialized and economies demand higher levels of skill, a large number of countries are reforming their vocational education and training systems, and governments and businesses are increasingly investing in the future of vocational education in order to improve its accessibility, quality and effectiveness in satisfying the labor market requirements.

In a rapidly changing environment, new ways and means of ensuring that people who work possess the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes are in fact critical for seizing the opportunities inherent to globalization and technological progress while reducing their unwanted consequences. Training objectives currently pursued by governments include enhancing national competitiveness and improving the labor market chances of either first-time job seekers or older workers made redundant; making national training systems at once more relevant, more effective and more efficient, and hence strengthening the role training systems play in national economic and social development.

In China, the rapid growth and structural change in the economy, coupled with reform of its State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), are placing major new demands on the skills and capabilities of its labour force and therefore on the country's educational and training system.
Financial investment shortages, defectiveness of system investment, lack of knowledge on school management, decrease of student’s enrolment are major constraints connected to the Chinese vocational education sector. At the same time, the employment services, especially in the western regions, suffer from limited resources and capacity to undertake survey to identify skills and adapt training programmes for the labor market, and from lack of integrated job placement systems.
Aware of these challenges, the Chinese government has drawn guidelines to address these problems in the last two 5-year plans, with particular attention dedicated to the development of the Western provinces.

In this framework, the Italian Development Cooperation intervention supports the Chinese government strategy for a sustainable and self-directed vocational education system’s reform. The intervention has the objective of supporting poverty reduction through the creation of jobs, the improvement of the Chinese labor force skills, the exportability of the labor force and the linkage between the education system and the labor market.