Switzerland, coordination
Dual-track vocational training
Switzerland runs most upper-secondary education through firms: of 218,259 students enrolled in vocational education and training in 2020, 90.6 percent, 197,782, were apprentices trained inside companies under federal law.
197,782 apprentices, apprentices in dual-track training, 2020. 90.6 % of VET students, share of vet students in the dual track, 2020. Cedefop, European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, dual-track VET scheme fiche, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
Federal law makes firms, cantons and professional associations joint owners of training: associations write the curricula for their own occupations, firms hire and pay apprentices to do real work, and the state examines and certifies, so the labour market signals what to teach.
Preconditions
- Employer associations strong enough to write and update curricula
- Apprentice wages low enough that training pays for the firm
- Social standing for the vocational route, so strong students choose it
Where it travelled: Germany and Austria run sibling systems; exports to countries without employer associations mostly produce school-based programmes with the dual name, which drops the part that works.
Limits: Enrolment counts participation in the system, not what the training is worth; the wage and employment evidence sits in separate studies. The system long predates the number: 2004 is the current federal act, not the start of apprenticeship in Switzerland, and the record cannot show how much of the outcome is the law versus a century of employer habit. Firms train because it pays them net of apprentice output, and that arithmetic, not the statute, is the load-bearing part.
This record describes what Switzerland delivered. It is linked to Public-private collaboration because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
The same gap elsewhere
2 deliveries linked to Public-private collaboration in other countries.
M-Pesa, and the regulator that let it run
Kenya's central bank let a phone company build a national payments system in 2007 and supervised it into ubiquity, and by June 2026 Kenya had 94.2 million registered mobile money accounts and 572,104 agents, in a population of about 55 million.
Itaipu Binacional, the treaty-built power system
Brazil and Paraguay built and operate Itaipu through a treaty-based binational entity, which reached 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity and has supplied both countries since the first unit entered operation in 1984.