needs of youth due to COVID-19, while 51 percent rated this support as “moderate”. Furthermore, youth in lower-income countries, who have been particularly vulnerable to loss of employment and working hours, have been supported by the UNDP COVID-19 offer. Some 77 percent of low-income countries included youth in their assessments, response plans and proposals/disbursement of RRF support. From the onset, the pandemic negatively affected the implementation of ongoing projects and programmes for youth economic empowerment, with many planned events and activities either postponed or cancelled. Most ongoing interventions shifted rapidly to digital delivery and incorporated the use of online sessions, while several were either reprogrammed or served as entry points for the COVID-19 response and recovery. Several youth economic empowerment projects successfully contributed to mitigating the adverse effect of the pandemic on young people.99 For example in Mali, UNDP supported the provision of labour-intensive public work for 500 young people, 151 of them women, to mitigate the adverse effect of the pandemic on these population groups. Based on youth testimonies collected by the SenseMaker, other UNDP projects such as MUNIJOVEN in Guatemala, Youth Connekt and TEF-YEP in Africa and the Youth Co: Lab in Asia and the Pacific also provided financial and technical support to youth-led businesses which effectively helped to mitigate the adverse effects of the pandemic. UNDP also promoted youth volunteerism in several countries. For instance, in Mali, volunteers engaged with remote communities and assisted in the sensitization and data collection for a local response.
3.2 PROGRAMMATIC RESULTS Finding 6. Skills development and empowerment chain. Skills development interventions contributed greatly to psychological and behavioural empowerment with fewer results in terms of economic benefits. UNDP support to improve employability primarily adopted a downstream approach with limited scope for more upstream structural responses. With its focus on strengthening supply, UNDP sought to remedy through a portfolio of skills development activities the mismatch between education and market demand, the scarce opportunities to transition to work through internships or job placements, and the insufficient job information and integration channels that connect young people to markets. The bulk of support came under the long-standing or “classical” livelihood support programmes that target disadvantaged and vulnerable communities, including youth. The classical livelihoods support stream tended to feature large-scale projects with multiple outcomes, one of which would be dedicated for youth economic empowerment. Only a few initiatives in this stream catered exclusively for youth, while the majority often included them as a subsidiary of a broader vulnerable and low-skilled target group in communities. These initiatives were particularly popular in fragile and conflict-affected contexts to strengthen the resilience of particularly vulnerable youth groups such as refugees or IDPs (Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Somalia and Yemen); ex-combatants (Mali, Somalia); or those residing in underserved rural or urban areas (Ecuador, Lebanon). However, most large-scale interventions only included youth as a subgroup of the broader target of vulnerable populations, which compromised the effectiveness of results in terms of youth economic empowerment. In most interventions for livelihoods support that were reviewed, youth inclusion was nominal, without much nuanced consideration of their specific attributes and needs. The criteria 99
The mini results-oriented annual reports in Power Bi reported that 37 projects totaling 73 outputs benefited youth under the UNDP COVID-19 offer in 2020, of which 26 projects and 41 outputs were related to youth economic empowerment.
CHAPTER 3. ASSESSMENT OF THE UNDP CONTRIBUTION TO YOUTH ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
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