The Case for Urgent Action on Youth Employment

HRH T HE P RINCE OF W ALES

A TRIBUTE Prince Charles’ 3-feather logo(above), is said to date back to the Black Prince, but few royal princes have lived the meaning of its words: “Ich Dien” (I serve) as enthusiastically as the current Prince of Wales. In many ways, his Prince’s Trust, founded in 1976, is the parent to all modern youth job creation initiatives. Therefore, we are proud to quote here a short -2-

extract of a recent speech he gave which makes a powerful case for urgent action on youth employment. Invest in Futures and Enterprise Business Start-up are both programmes of the Prince’s Trust. Prince Charles is clearly, and rightly, proud of the achievements of both of them.

Invest in Futures now has a whole host of Job Ambassadors now, who go into the dark, difficult corners of this country trying to reach the hardest to reach people who disappear off all the radars. Their job is to encourage them to come to the Trust so that we can help them even further.

People like Duane Jackson, who is, I think, the most fantastic and classic example of what the Trust's Enterprise Business Start-up programme can do. Duane really does represent the "virtuous circle" I always hoped to create all those years ago by investing in these young people's futures.

Duane grew up in a children's home. He left school without any qualifications, he ended up for one reason or another in prison but, when he came out, with the help of my Trust, he set up a software business which he has now sold for tens of millions of pounds and, immediately, he gave £100,000 to my Trust to help other young people.

I was reminded of Duane yesterday when I was in Tottenham: I met Gina Moffatt, who was sent to Holloway Prison for drug offences and, on release, turned to my Trust for help in setting up her own business.

Several years on, Gina now has ten full-time employees in her caférestaurant, which I visited in Tottenham. She has another one somewhere else and is about to open one in Chelsea, if she can. She has now come back as a Job Ambassador, helping other young people in her local area to find the necessary skills and then jobs. So you can imagine what an enormous encouragement that gives me to see the difference they can make, not only to themselves but to us.

What my Trust is also doing is investing in skills because I think the key in all of this is enabling young people to have their latent talent and vocational skills developed. All this has been abandoned and forgotten in so many ways and yet I know from talking to the Royal Academy of Engineering, for instance, that there is a need for 69,000 Level 3 -3-

engineering apprentices every year for the next ten years and all that can be produced at the moment is 27,000: you can imagine what a difference just in the engineering sector that could make if the act could be got together. So I've been trying to organise workshops with teachers and engineering firms in order to try and find a way through this particular issue, because there are so many people out there who think that engineering is dirty, greasy and filthy and manufacturing is dead and gone. In fact it is very far from the case. So what my Trust can help do with others is to revive and resuscitate the skills that are necessary and much needed all over the country to resuscitate our manufacturing sector and other parts of the economy.

I hope you feel pleased as I am by some of the most marvellously inspiring stories from the young people who have been through The Trust's programmes and come out the other end with their confidence restored and their self-esteem restored.

And this, as you may realise is really what The Trust has been trying to specialise in for the last 42 years because there are so many young people out there who have no self-confidence and self-esteem but when we can help to provide that for them through, particularly these team programmes when everybody has to depend on somebody else, it is remarkable what a difference it can make to their lives. Suddenly they discover they have interest they can pursue, go to college or become an apprentice. We need to be willing to listen to these young people talk about their experiences as it does, I think, help to generate greater awareness of the support we need to generate to help the next generation.

Many of the young people we come across have faced the most extraordinary hurdles, challenges and obstacles in their lives. Whether they face the mental health issues that are so prevalent today or homelessness, abuse, bullying of various kinds or indeed imprisonment, they have all shown that, with courage and determination, they can overcome those issues and ultimately take more control of their lives through joining The Trust's programmes.

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Over the last 42 years we have helped more than 870,000 young people ( - I can never understand why it isn't over a million yet, but you can't count people twice because they come back on different programmes!)

Obviously a lot has changed over the years, in particularly the impact of technology and changes in the labour market which can be seen everywhere. Many of these changes have been positive of course, but at The Prince's Trust we have become increasingly concerned about young people's confidence and sense of self-worth. My Trust released its 9th youth index report just two weeks ago and it shows that young people's happiness and confidence are at the lowest levels since the study began.

Which is alarming.

In the worst cases a fundamental lack of confidence can hold young people back from even starting or progressing in our programmes, so it was vital that we could respond in some way to this. Having started Invest in Futures in 2005 I was so thrilled to hear in that time up to now it has raised over 21 million pounds. L'OrĂŠal Paris's sponsorship of Invest in Futures marks now the first anniversary of a three year collaborative partnership. This partnership has enabled the delivery of the new All Worth It confidence-training programme to run across all 18 of The Prince's Trust centres. It will also be available digitally via The Trust's online learning platform. Yes we have one! Very exciting!

Whatever barriers young people face, The Prince's Trust will support them. So, ladies and gentlemen, by working together we can help so many more young people turn their lives around. Thank you all enormously, thank you!

Thank you, your Royal Highness, for choosing the issue of Youth Employment to champion!

Hopefully other people in positions of power and influence will be persuaded to follow your example -5-

THE PARLIAMENTARY NETWORK ON THE WORLD BANK AND IMF

The Case for Urgent Action on Youth Employment CONTENTS INTRODUCTIONS • • • • •

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Introduction – Kristalina Georgieva, Chief Executive, World Bank Introduction – Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt MP, Secretary of State, DFID, UK Why a global campaign? – Jeremy Lefroy MP for Stafford; Chair, Parliamentary Network A short history of youth job creation How would a global campaign for youth employment work?

GOVERNMENT COMMITMENTS • • • • •

Job Aspirations of African youth – Ulla Tørnaes, Minister for Development Cooperation, Denmark Commitments from the Government of Tunisia Message to the Global Campaign from the Government of Seychelles Message of Support from the Government of Tanzania Message from the Government of Ghana

4 7 9 11 16

21 22 26 33 36 37

RESEARCH

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• • • • • •

40 46 50 54 56 62

The Evidence is in: Youth Employment in Low Income Countries by Louise Fox, USAID; Summary Generation Jobless – Economist magazine articles on youth unemployment; Summary Jobs & Livelihood – House of Commons Intl. Development Committee report; Extracts Integration – a new direction for youth employment programmes by Michal Rutowski, World Bank International Labour Organisation (ILO): UN lead agency on youth employment: Extracts Global Opportunity Youth – Landscape study by Jamie McAuliffe, Aspen Institute

WHAT WORKS

67

• • • • • • • • •

68 71 74 77 80 84 87 90 92

Young Africa Works – the Mastercard Foundation strategy for Young People in Africa by Reeta Roy The Value of Life skills – William S Reese, CEO, Intl. Youth Foundation Approaches to Mentorship – Jonathan Pfahl, Founder & CEO, Rockstar Group School Enterprise Programme – Nik Kafka & Martin Burt, Teach a Man to Fish/Fundacion Paraguay Hilton Hospitality: Connecting - Preparing - Employing – Chris Nassetta, CEO, Hilton Fighting the odds by creating their own jobs – Dorothea Arndt, CEO, Hand in Hand International Inclusive Entrepreneurship skill training – Adriana Poglia & Rob Giddings, Peace Child Intl.

Developing Entrepreneurial Skills and Mindsets – Julia Deans, Futurepreneurs, Canada The Commonwealth and Youth Entrepreneurship

YOUTH SAY WHAT WORKS

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• • • • • • • • •

94 97 98 100 101 103 104 105 107

Preparing Youth for After School Life – Ocheck Msuva, CEO, Bridge for Change, Tanzania The Entrepreneurial Generation – Lina Maria Useche, CEO, Alianca Empreendedora, Brazil Has Education failed students on employability – Benjamin Fraser, Commonwealth Youth Empower the Youth – Mfundo Mohammed, Commonwealth Youth Build Robust Entrepreneurship Eco-systems – Shamoy Hajare, Commonwealth Youth The CAYE Perspective – Bernard Oduro Takyi, Regional Coordinator, CAYE W Africa How governments can address Youth Employment – Nancy Amunga, Commonwealth Youth Power to Social Entrepreneurs – Shomy Hasan Chowdury, Commonwealth Youth Leadership Initiatives – Antoine Eloi & Marshall Bailly II, co-founders The views expressed in this Booklet are those of the authors, not those of the Parliamentary Network

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THE CASE FOR URGENT ACTION ON YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

INTRODUCTIONS

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Kristalina Georgieva Chief Executive, The World Bank

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INTRODUCTION JOB INSECURITY IS A FACT OF LIFE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE by

Kristalina Georgieva This article first appeared in the Financial Times special report on youth employment, 21st April 2017. Reprinted by permission

Shortly after graduating from university in Sofia, Bulgaria at the age of 23, I was hired as an assistant professor. It was everything I had hoped for – intellectually challenging with a predictable career path all the way through to retirement. Such were the certainties of the 1970s.

I wish it was as easy for today’s 23-year olds. But, sadly, it is not.

One of the ironies of our times is that the world has never been wealthier – global GDP topped $75 trillion in 2016. Yet there has never been so much anxiety over the future of work. It is particularly tough for the under-25s; they are about four times as likely to be unemployed as their elders. As life expectancy rises, so does the need for people of my generation to keep working, which is a further block to younger job seekers.

With the nature of work changing continuously, job insecurity is now a fact of life.

Artificial intelligence and automation are eliminating a range of blue and white-collar jobs, from trucking to banking, affecting people in both rich and poor countries.

Achieving the UN’s sustainable development goal of full and productive employment and decent work for all by 2030 will be a tall order. We need to create at least 600m more jobs before that deadline to keep up with new entrants joining the job market – and at least two-thirds of these jobs need to be in the developing world, where the youth population is growing fastest. If we fail, we will squander what ought to be a demographic dividend for developing countries.

Governments should help young people start their own enterprises and link small businesses and farmers to larger markets.

It is important to note that jobs not only provide income, they also help workers connect to the society around them. This is especially important for young people in poorer countries and in regions torn by conflict.

At the World Bank Group, we have invested in understanding country employment dynamics and how they affect youth. We know from our analysis that, to tackle youth unemployment, we have to create the right kinds of jobs in the right places, through investments that are both economically and socially profitable.

For example, while manufacturing and services were once routes out of poverty for millions of young workers, technological innovation is making those paths more difficult to take. Likewise, investment that is concentrated in capital-intensive industries

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that generate few jobs, like oil and gas, leaves workers trapped in temporary or informal labour.

In the parts of the world where youth unemployment is highest, agriculture is still the biggest employer. Two-thirds of Sub-Saharan African workers work in the agricultural sector, where productivity is low and earnings stagnant. They might improve their job prospects by moving to the city but without education and access to technology, they have little hope of advancement.

What can we do to help?

The starting point should be education. All children need to go to – and stay in – school. Research shows the ability to learn throughout life, to adapt and to work flexibly, will be vital – as will technical, social, and critical thinking skills. Education has to adapt to help people become life-long learners.

To enhance the employment prospects of the young – and meet the wants of the local market – we also need to improve the design of training programmes. In Argentina, the World Bank is helping the government strengthen and expand training for disadvantaged young adults. A programme we are supporting in Ivory Coast matches first-time workers to internship schemes that lead to permanent jobs with full benefits.

Second, governments need policies that encourage the private sector to generate more jobs. This includes investing in transport and digital infrastructure. We find that young companies are normally the most dynamic in creating good quality jobs, but they also need the most help to get going. Governments should help young people start their own enterprises and link small businesses and farmers to larger markets.

Third, because it will take time to bring all businesses into the formal sector, for the foreseeable future, many jobs for young people in developing countries will remain informal.

The challenge is to help informal workers and enterprises diversify and increase their productivity, and to connect them to marketing expertise in innovation to help their businesses grow. Universal social safety nets will also be critical so that benefits are not limited to workers in the formal sector.

There are clear steps we can take, but we have to work together – governments, the private sector, academia and civil society. As former UK prime minister, Gordon Brown’s 2016 Education Commission report on financing global education noted: “Economies will rise or fall depending more on their intellectual resources than their physical resources.”

Preparing for the jobs of the future depends on the actions we take today, so that the defining technological, economic and demographic trends of this century will create opportunity rather than entrench inequality.

I want the 23-year-olds of tomorrow to feel the same hope for their future as I did when I left university.

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INTRODUCTION Rt. Hon Penny Mordaunt MP, UK Secretary of State for International Development

The Global Campaign for Youth Employment could not be more timely. Youth unemployment is one of the most pressing and important global challenges of our time.

An estimated 18 million young people a year are entering the labour force in Sub Saharan Africa alone and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Too few jobs are being created in most developing countries. In some Asian countries, more than 1 in 4 young people are not in work or education. In some parts of the Caribbean, more than half of young people are outside of the labour force.

As my parliamentary colleague Jeremy Lefroy sets out so eloquently in his own introduction to this booklet: with a lack of job prospects comes an increased threat of instability, insecurity and violence. These threats encourage desperate, undocumented migration as people search for better prospects, at considerable personal risk to life and straining receiving countries’ ability to manage the volume of aspirants.

This challenge affects the entire international community and it is in our interest, all across the globe, to deliver the scale of job creation needed. We cannot allow a generation of young people to be marginalised in this way. They represent a massive

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potential for the world economy - energetic, brimming with ideas, ambition and drive.

They are thirsting to form a productive part of the global economy. We cannot put off taking action any longer. These young people have the attributes and the numbers to help propel greater global prosperity.

The issues that many contributors to this publication have set out are right and important to address: from education, to entrepreneurship, from apprenticeships to improved linkages to agriculture; these will give young people the tools to be able to create more productive jobs for themselves and they are essential to ensure as many young people as possible are able to benefit from improved job opportunities.

But we also need to focus on the issue that will make or break our collective ambition at the massive scale that is needed: how to create millions of better quality job opportunities through large scale productive investment over the next decade.

UK Aid is primed to play its part. The UK supports a wide range of initiatives to help the private sector generate better jobs in developing countries, from developing energy and transport infrastructure, helping countries industrialise and urbanise, to making commercial agriculture more productive, expanding trading opportunities and making regulations streamlined and predictable for business.

And we are working hard to deliver on the need for large scale productive investment.

The UK’s Development Finance Institution CDC is central. It is one of a handful of investors with the skills and risk appetite to successfully support businesses in the most difficult markets. Over the last 3 years, companies backed by CDC investments paid taxes to national governments worth over US$9 billion that can be ploughed back into productive public investments. CDC’s successful investments pave the way for other private investors by demonstrating to them the opportunities that exist.

As one of the largest capital markets, the City of London is a natural partner to deliver on the ambition. By enabling the City of London to become a leading financial centre for the developing world, we can make it easier for developing countries to access the muchneeded capital to deliver productive investments at scale. We are working hard to help the City make this shift.

But the UK cannot do this alone. The scale is far too large for any single actor to resolve. Therefore, my main message to you as you read this booklet is that to deliver on the urgency of this Global Campaign for Youth Employment, we need an equally ambitious and tractable Global Partnership for Youth Employment bringing together all relevant actors, governments, development agencies, the private sector and NGOs around a single vision and plan to deliver results at scale.

The UK stands ready to play its part. We look forward to working with you all to make this ambition a reality. The youth of the developing world are counting on us. We cannot let them down.

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Why do we need a Global Campaign for Youth Employment?

by Jeremy Lefroy, MP for Stafford, United Kingdom, Chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank In Calais, earlier this year, I met with some young African and Asian women and men hanging around, eager to come to the UK to get a job and kickstart their lives.

Their faces and their stories impressed upon me the absolute priority of creating decent jobs and livelihoods for smart young people like these back home in their own countries. Because each one of them agreed: if such jobs existed in their home countries, they would not have had to undertake the perilous journey to Europe.

We, in the OECD DAC countries, along with the private sector, institutions like the World Bank and IMF + LIC Governments and youth themselves – need to do much, much more to address the priority of creating jobs for young people.

You will read in this booklet of those from each sector who are doing just this. The Mastercard Foundation is leading the way with its commitment to enabling 30 million African youth, especially young women, to secure dignified and fulfilling work by 2030. (see page 68) But every contributor has an important story to tell. The purpose of our Campaign is to draw all these lessons together, and work with individual governments and their local stakeholders to create a bespoke suite of policies that will create thousands of new jobs for youth in their own specific context.

This has been a passion of mine all my working life. I have seen international cooperation on malaria, and other diseases such as HIV/AIDS and TB, achieve extraordinary results in less than 20 years through the Gates Foundation, the Global Fund, Medicines for Malaria Venture and other initiatives. It is estimated that we will need to create 600 million new jobs in the next 10-15 years to meet the demand of a growing population. The potential consequences of failing to create them are clear – increased poverty, forced migration and conflict. So more international cooperation

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around the creation of jobs and livelihoods for young people has to be a priority for all of us.

Last year, I met Ronald, a young Ugandan tech entrepreneur. After losing his parents, he paid his way through school and university through farming. He is now developing apps for use in agriculture and providing work for several young Ugandans.

But not only that, he is sharing his knowledge and skills with many others so that they too can find work or set up on their own. When I visited their offices with Nathan Nandala MP, my colleague on the Board of the Parliamentary Network, it was a hive of creative activity and an inspiration to us both.

It is people such as Ronald and his colleagues who will be playing a key role in creating these jobs. They can see what is required and have the energy, commitment and skills to achieve it, not just for their own future but for that of their fellow countrymen and women. Involving young people in this campaign is not just a nice thing to do: it is essential to generating the energy and creativity that will ensure its success.

For young people have an endless capacity to surprise – as you will read in these pages: who would have thought a couple of Tunisian brothers would have created the first car to be designed and built in Africa: the Wallyscar. Who would have thought a 16-year old Ugandan would have started a Venture Capital company to support his peers to create their own companies – or a 22-year old Brazilian woman would start a movement of young entrepreneurs that created over a thousand companies in its first ten years of operation?

But young people need more support, more finance and more training as well as governments which are open and friendly to enterprise. They need an education system which teaches the skills to do market research, to identify business opportunities, and acquire the skills to create and grow new companies successfully.

I have seen several governments working to teach work-readiness in schools, to create better access for young people to small business micro-finance and to appropriate technical training and apprenticeships. They also recruit youth to work on public works programmes to improve infrastructure and introduce active labour market policies(ALMPs) to create more business-friendly environments. Some are successful, some less so.

The Global Campaign for Youth Employment will highlight why some of these are successful, and some are not. Its aim is practical: to secure increased inward investment and policies that create job growth, and not just wealth growth. It will act as a clearinghouse for information on which policies are effective, and which are less effective, in creating good, satisfying and sustainable jobs and livelihoods for the rapidly expanding youth populations of Low Income Countries(LICs). And it will encourage LIC governments, donors, international institutions, private sector companies, educators and youth themselves to work together and do much, much more to make youth job creation a major policy priority in the coming years.

Only in that way will the young men and women I met in Calais earlier this year be enabled to live fulfilling lives in their home countries and not be tempted to risk perilous journeys to escape poverty.

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A S HORT H ISTORY OF Y OUTH J OB C REATION

From fathers teaching sons the techniques of warfare, farming or state-craft, to mediaeval guilds teaching apprentices their trades; from Roosevelt’s Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps – building schools, bridges and woodland trails, to the Soviet Communist Party’s commitment to cradle-to-grave employment – youth job creation has long been a feature of local and national governance.

Following the end of the 2nd World War, some students founded AIESEC – to build international solidarity and create alternatives to military jobs which elders had, traditionally, relied on youth to fill. AIESEC, founded in 1948, was an early example of youth fostering leadership through creating exchanges, conferences and internships.

Now one of the largest youth-led organisations in the world, with over 70,000 members, it has pioneered the concept of youth agency: youth pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and creating their own jobs and livelihoods. Though some youth still believe that the world, or society, owes them a living, youth job creation should always begin with youth taking control of their destiny.

In the short history of international development assistance, the idea of ending poverty through creating jobs is a relatively recent phenomenon. An early example was the setting up of the Prince’s Trust in the UK. When Prince Charles left the navy in 1976, he used his severance pay to fund small projects in deprived areas. This grew and, in the early 1980s, unemployment reached a 50-year high and riots broke out in Brixton, Birmingham and Liverpool. Charles visited the rioters and asked them why they didn’t get jobs. “No jobs round here,” they told him [ - correctly! Toxteth in Liverpool had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.] “So why don’t you start a business – create your own job?” asked Charles. “No one would give us any money to do that,” they replied. And Charles thought a moment, then said: “I would.” And so started the Prince’s Trust Enterprise Programme which, since 1983, has started 80,000 mostly

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disadvantaged young people in business – several of whom have gone on to become millionaires, and captains of industry.

The model was franchised around the world in 1990 by the Prince’s International Business Leaders Forum IBLF which eventually spun it off as the independent Youth Business International. This now works in 50 countries and has helped tens of thousands of young people launch their own businesses. The Prince’s Trust pioneered the concept of business start-up mentors finding that, with a caring mentor, 70 to 80% of new businesses survived and prospered for at least three years. Without a mentor, that figure dropped to around 20%. It also devised ways for youth to access to capital for there is nothing more frustrating for young people than to do business plan creation training, create a viable business plan, and then find there is no way to access the funds needed to operationalise it.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Prince’s Trust has been much flattered – especially by the Commonwealth. Many Commonwealth countries now have branches of Youth Business and/or Prince’s Trust International. The Commonwealth Secretariat has, since 1973, had an active Youth Programme, now almost exclusively focussed on youth enterprise and job creation. It has created 4 x Commonwealth Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs (CAYEs) – in the Caribbean & Canada, in Asia and in East & Southern Africa. These bring together young entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and inventors, enabling them to share ideas and build businesses together. Through its research, its awards programmes and its regular meetings of ministers and thoughtleaders, the Commonwealth member states put into effect their belief that young people aged 15-29 are assets to a country's development and should be empowered to realise their potential. (See page 92, and Commonwealth youth leaders’ essays, pages 98 to 106) Around the turn of the millennium, youth job and enterprise creation entered the main stream of development thinking. Peace Child International developed the concept of ‘youth-led development’ – development delivered by young people, not just for young people. In 2003, Hand in Hand Co-Founder Percy Barnevik teamed up with Indian development specialist, Dr Kalpana Sankar, to devise the Hand in Hand job creation model. In the USA, Rick Little got a $64m grant from the Kellogg Foundation to start the International Youth Foundation (IYF) to replicate ‘initiatives that work’ in the youth field. IYF developed the immensely successful Entra 21 project – a unique partnership between government, the private sector, educators and youth themselves to match educational curricula to the needs of private sector employers. It has gone on to develop Passport to Success® (see page 71) – which addresses the problem that many

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young people face: they have the technical skills to do a job but lack the life skills to grow a management team and make a company successful company.

MBAs became the university course of choice for all young people trying to get into business. Hundreds of training establishments with names like the ‘Gazelle’ or ‘Peter Jones’ Academies’ appeared offering short courses in business start-ups. Dragon’s Den became one of the most popular programmes on British television enabling entrepreneurs to pitch their business ideas to people like Doug Richard, founder of Cambridge Angels and School for Start-ups. The UK government got in on the act, providing loan guarantees to the Start-up Loans Company, which they hired another ‘Dragon,’ James Caan, to manage. Working through regional delivery partners, they have, in six years, loaned £360m to over 50,000 start-up companies.

Away from the UK, US real estate magnate, Ron Bruder, started Education for Employment (EFE) in 2002 following the 9/11 attacks – to help young people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region channel their energy and talents into job and enterprise creation. The MENA region has a huge youth population and one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. The Arab Spring was largely driven by unemployed youth: EFE, Jordan’s INJAZ, Qatar’s Silatech and many other initiatives are all working hard to create jobs in the MENA for the youth of the region.

In 2008/09, as parts of Europe saw their youth unemployment rates soar to over 50%, the lowest youth unemployment rates in the world were to be found in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. These were, in part, due to the Dual System of education practised in all three countries: students get the chance to do work experience and apprenticeships, so that they can learn skills, develop good work habits and forge a relationship with a company or local employer while still at school. The UK Studio Schools network offers similar courses. Scandinavia, they lowered youth unemployment through job guarantee schemes – which guarantee students a job, or a place on a training course, within months of leaving school. A similar scheme has now been developed by the European Commission and introduced across all EU Member States.

Outside Europe, in Low Income Countries, such schemes are generally too expensive for governments to consider. Some – like South Africa – deliver jobs through Expanded Public Works schemes which engage youth in infrastructure projects and teach them good work habits and marketable skills at the same time. A version of the Dual System has been developed by Fundacion Paraguaya and Teach a Man to Fish – with the School Enterprise and Self-financing School initiatives: youth in schools generate income through starting and running small businesses, the income from which pays their teachers and the school building rent.

Several donor and private sector initiatives now work to ease youth access to finance – through loan guarantees, stock or equipment leasing arrangements, mobile phone micro-credit, or, like www.Kiva.org and www.lendwithcare.org, through online loan schemes.In 2011, the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Youth Investment found that “less than one quarter of one per cent of loan portfolios of finance providers are directed to those under the age of 30…” That figure has doubtless improved, but in a recent PCI survey, 91% of youth reported that access to capital is the biggest obstacle

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for them trying to start a new enterprise or move into productive self-employment. In the history of youth job creation, access to finance is a challenge that never goes away.

Over-arching all these initiatives is the UN system’s work on youth job creation.

From UNESCO’s Education for All and youth training programmes, to UNEP’s Green Economy initiative, almost every UN agency is doing something to help youth into what the ILO calls “decent work.” The ILO is the UN’s lead agency on youth employment, and its Global Employment Trends for Youth (GET Youth) publication (see page 56) updates, every two years, global youth employment statistics. GET Youth is an essential reference work for all in this field. The ILO also runs the Global Initiative for Decent Work – agreed by the heads of all UN Agencies in February 2016. Guy Ryder, ILO Director General, said, in launching the initiative: “In low-income countries, nine in ten young workers remain in informal employment which is sporadic, poorly paid and falls outside the protection of law. This initiative will make full use of the expertise of participating UN entities and focus on “green jobs” for youth, quality apprenticeships, digital skills and the building of “tech-hubs” to promote youth entrepreneurship and support young people facilitate transition from the informal to the formal economy.”

The other big beast in the international Youth Job Creation field is the World Bank’s Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) initiative – a coalition of private sector, government, and third sector thought leaders who work together to “link, leverage and learn” solutions to the global problem of youth unemployment. Founded in 2015, it has published several valuable reports and analyses. One of these, a Systematic review of 113 World Bank and IFC Youth Job Creation Projects, drew attention to the need for the Systems Approach we seek to promote in the Global campaign. The Report stated: We find strong evidence that programmes that integrate multiple interventions are more likely to succeed because they are better able to respond to the different needs of beneficiaries.

• Entrepreneurship training combined with access to finances provide best impacts.

• A combination of complementary interventions, such as training with job search, placement assistance in partnership the private sector, personal monitoring and follow up of individual participants, has more positive effects than isolated interventions.

• In countries with a strong, formal jobs sector, programmes that smooth the transition from school to work with work-based skills development are the most effective.

• In rural low-income areas, where youth are active in agriculture and non-farm selfemployment, stimulating rural agribusinesses markets is effective • Temporary wage subsidies paid to employers to hire youth and teach them with higher-level skills has positive employment impact.

• Depending on design, and matching skills delivered to employer’s needs, skills training can improve youth’s employment prospects.

The report also pointed out interventions that are less effective: • Employment services interventions appear to deliver the weakest outcomes.

• In labour-abundant, low-income countries with weak institutions e.g. in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, interventions targeting formal employment may be regressive.

The report also lays out Key Policy Considerations which, like those identified in the

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Economist’s 2013 issue on ‘Generation Jobless’ (see page 46) are still highly relevant today: • More than 50% of investments / interventions in our analysis are supply side measures but public investments must be based on a better understanding of the constraints to sustained and broad-based job creation on the demand side as well as greater employability skills on the supply side.

• We know policy- and system-levels interventions are critical to reach scale, but we don't have enough evidence on how active labour market policy affects youth.

• No one-size fits all: constraints and opportunities vary by person and by place. More data is needed on spatial + gender-based gaps where targeted policies / programmes may be necessary • Youth inclusion and participation is important: primary research on youth is key to understand their perspectives on their environment & the constraints they face.

The event which arguably made the greatest impact on the youth Job Creation field was the agreement, in September 2015, all 193 UN Member Governments to sign up to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. For Goal 8, Target 5 promises, by 2030: “… to achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and people with disabilities….”

The World Bank calculates that this would generate up to $5 trillion growth in the Global economy. This is why the Parliamentary Network (PN) on the World Bank and IMF – under the leadership of its current chair, Jeremy Lefroy MP, UK and Vice-chair, Olfa Cherif, Tunisia – have sought to raise the profile of youth job creation amongst its parliamentary members. It has also sought to promote the policy solutions proposed by the World Bank and the many other governments and NGOs active in this field.

The PN has done this by publishing 4 x editions of a Youth Job Creation Policy Primer all of which are available at: www.youthjobcreation.org – as is this Booklet, along with links to all the organisations, and data-sets referred to. We thank the PN for its leadership and encourage its members to recognise that, in both the international arena, but more in their national arenas, solutions to youth employment usually start with the legislation, tax and procurement regimes that they manage.

The leadership of the PN has proved invaluable – and its success is demonstrated by the fact that Youth Job Creation is now high on the agenda of many governments, UN institutions, donors, investors and the private sector. But the crisis is far from resolved.

Which is why we need a Global Campaign for Youth Employment.

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HOW WOULD A GLOBAL CAMPAIGN FOR YOUTH EMPLOYMENT WORK? GOALS 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

To promote policies that will help UN Member states deliver on their UN SDG 8, Goal 5 promise to “achieve full and productive employment for all…”

To continue to push youth job creation ideas and policies higher up the agendas of all politicians, business leaders, NGOs, educators and young people; To emphasise the importance of multiple, integrated interventions: the Systems Approach which involves implementing several policies simultaneously.

To forge, and energize, partnerships between stakeholders, because youth job creation cannot be achieved by any one stakeholder alone; To ‘accentuate the positive’ and promote solutions:

RATIONALE Let’s examine those goals in more detail: ONE: “Full Employment” – actually means about 3% unemployment because of the normal churn of people changing jobs, taking time off for sabbaticals etc. Some experts now equate unemployment rates of 4, 5 or 6% as justifiable definitions of full employment. The key word, for Low Income Countries, is ‘productive’: for many millions of people in these countries, young and old, find themselves under-employed or as working poor - not earning enough to feed and keep their families in good health.

TWO: Prioritise Youth Job Creation: Many more people and agencies are talking about youth job creation than they were ten years ago but there is very little additional investment in the field. The private and public sectors know that profits, and solvency, are better driven by reducing pay-rolls than increasing them. So job-rich growth must be prioritised for political and social reasons, not purely financial ones.

THREE: The Systems Approach: Many governments and institutions persist with piecemeal solutions – a little skills training here, some wage subsidies there. It is only by reviewing all possible policy solutions together and implementing as many as are appropriate simultaneously, that jobs will be created at scale across a nation or region.

FOUR: Forging Partnerships: Creating jobs is not something that can be done by governments alone. Yes they must lead – but they must work in partnership with NGOs, business leaders, educators and young people themselves. And we must look East, West and North – South to see what other countries are doing. For as the crisis of youth

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unemployment bites deeper all over the world, solutions of all kinds are popping up everywhere. The most important partnership is with youth themselves: teachers and adults must level with them and explain the full extent of the problem. And they must give them the skills and the confidence that will enable them to be part of the solution.

FIVE: Promoting Solutions: people are right to be scared at the scale of the problem – • The need to create 6 million jobs a month, a million a month in Sub-Saharan Africa alone!

• A billion new jobs by 2030 just to maintain unemployment at current levels.

• 2 to 3 billion more by mid-century as tens of millions of traditional jobs disappear to digitization, automation and robotics; – and – • The need to teach new skills and self-learning techniques as the World Economic Forum estimates that “65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”

But failure is not an option: if we are going to keep bringing young people into the world, it is our duty to create decent jobs for them to do when they grow up. So: “Don’t tell me it’s impossible. Show me a solution!”

That’s what our campaign is designed to do.

HOW? – THE LAYER CAKE APPROACH… There are several key features of a Systems Approach to Youth Job Creation and the contributors to this booklet outline several of them. But first, it may be helpful to consider the layer cake approach which separates their solutions into 4 x vital “Layers” of activity, thus: Layer ONE: Massively increase inward investment: It is axiomatic that, as a country gets richer, the share of the labour force working the formal waged sector rises, and the number working in self-employment or the informal economy declines. So, as DFID SoS, Penny Mordaunt, says in her Introduction (see page 7) – DFID is “working hard to deliver on the need for large scale productive investment.” Only this will increase the number of formal jobs available to youth. And, as the Economist points out (see page 47), this must go hand-in-hand with deregulating labour markets: “countries that let business cartels curb competition, place high taxes on labour, enforce high minimum wages or impose regulations that make it hard to fire people, are bad places for the young jobless.”

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Layer TWO: Improve Skills Training: A USAID official famously said: “Training programmes are the crack cocaine of the youth employment field: we’re addicted to them!” As Louise Fox points out in her paper (page 40), skills training for jobs that do not exist is a waste of money. She, and the Economist argue for better skills-matching and Julia Deans argues for more skill training to be done in schools. (page 90) Basic skills – reading, writing, numeracy – are important, but PCI has shown that mobile apps and visual techniques can allow entrepreneurship to flourish in the absence of such skills. And Teach a Man to Fish (page 77) shows how school-based enterprises can both teach young people entrepreneurial skills and help to finance the school. Jonathan Pfahl (page 74) points out the importance of mentorship, and Ocheck Msuva (page 94) highlights the importance of career and life-planning guidance – and its almost complete absence from Low Income Countries.

Layer THREE: Engage the Private Sector: As 80 to 90% of new jobs will be created by the private sector, and taxes paid by private companies pay for 100% of public sector jobs, the private sector is key to new job creation. McKinsey and others point out that many private sector companies complain that government education and training systems do not deliver the employees they need. The World Bank finds that private companies deliver better training than the public sector. They are also the sector that must be persuaded to invest in job-rich growth. Usually, they also provide the first experience of business that allows young entrepreneurs to develop the courage, and the vision, to start their own enterprises. On page 80, Chris Nassetta offers a private sector perspective on youth job creation training and the need to show young people what different business sectors have to offer. And Bill Reese of the International Youth Foundation explains why life skills training is often the key to success in finding, and retaining, a job in the private sector.

Layer FOUR: Create a bespoke suite of Demand- and Supply-side Policies at scale: The top layer of the cake is perhaps the most interesting as it includes the myriad of little things that any government can do often at very little, or no, cost. Initially, the Campaign will focus on these as we find many governments, youth and private sector companies are not aware that such policies exist. In our policy store, we have over 200 different policy products: they may be clustered under the following headings: • Involve youth! As Ulla Tørnaes argues, on page 22, “Youth are experts in their own aspirations. Fostering an intergenerational dialogue can help unleash these aspirations, and translate them into viable and realizable achievements.” Youth Unemployment is a youth problem so Priority 1: engage youth in solving it.

• • •

Entrepreneurship education – at every level in every school. But beware! There is both effective and ineffective entrepreneurship education: it needs to be carefully calibrated to fit the needs of the country, region and/or local economy.

Basic Skills Training: all the evidence suggests that it is easier for youth who read and write to get jobs – but many youth in Low Income Countries emerge from several years of schooling without these basic skills. So – Education quality has to improve.

Extra-curricular Business Plan Creation Training: teach practical business creation skills in schools out of school hours;

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• • • • • • • • • • • • •

School Enterprise and Self-financing Schools – experiential learning of running a business at schools both teaches youth business skills and helps to pay their teachers’ salaries; Comprehensive career guidance – for all students at all levels in schools and universities.

Students need to know the shifting realities of the labour market that lies beyond the school gates, so that they and their parents can plan and navigate their education paths accordingly.

Apprenticeships, part-time jobs, dual systems of education and work experience – for all students. Don’t copycat exactly the Austrian, Swiss and German programmes but adapt and re-create them until you replicate their success in your own local context.

21st century skills training: include green tech, IT & computer skills, 3-D printing etc. in all national education provision; Enable Youth Access to Capital – via loan guarantees, equipment leasing, stock or rent credit etc. As Lina Useche says on page 97, “It is imperative to create innovative ways to support young people who want to start their own business to gain access to credit.”

Enable Youth Access to Mentorship – often the key to the success or failure of a youthled business start-up; (see page 74) Simplify Business Registration Procedures – to enable new businesses to register at close to zero cost; Active Labour Market Policies – break up the cartelization of different industries Job-creating Networks: create jobs clubs and enterprise networks to help youth learn from each other; Business Plan Competitions: popular, and effective, ways of building entrepreneurship Empower & support young women into decent jobs – it is their human right + female empowerment grows economies by up to 25%, as Ulla Tørnaes reports. (see page 25) Create Jobs for the disabled – young people with physical or mental disabilities can grow economies too; Government-led initiatives – wage subsidies, tax breaks, preferential procurement from youth-led business start-ups, EU-Nordic style youth job guarantee schemes, expanded public works programmes, large-scale infrastructure projects – all are great job creators and develop skills and good work habits amongst young people.

There are hundreds more policy solutions and detailed studies of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) which the Campaign can explore with partners – on both the demand and supply sides. The Campaign’s goal is to learn and share experience, good and bad, then explore with individual governments and stakeholders within each country to develop a suite of policies appropriate to their local / national context.

Further, this challenge is so important and so difficult, we must not have any secrets. Actual training materials may be copyright, but ideas and evaluations need to be shared. We will seek radical transparency from all our partners and openly explore how to adapt a policy intervention successful in one country to fit the context of another.

SCHEDULE OF WORK There is an immense body of learning gathered by organisations like the World Bank, the Commonwealth Youth Division, the ILO and practitioner agencies. In this booklet, we re-publish Jamie McAuliffe’s excellent Aspen Institute study of the landscape of youth job creation initiatives, funding sources and platforms (see page 62).

However, there has been no exhaustive study of the youth job creation policy

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interventions carried out by OECD-DAC member agencies or those carried out by individual country governments. As donors, and everyone else, needs to know what others have been doing in this field, a bench-marking study of what each DAC ODA has done – and how effective each intervention has proved – is Job One for this campaign.

We shall provide PN Members, and other stake-holders, with honest and informed evidence, written in crisp, accessible language, of what has worked well, what worked less well – and which interventions are the most cost-effective.

Armed with this information, we shall then pursue the following 3-stage approach: Task ONE: Bench-marking: the GCYE will first find governments that share our passion to reduce youth unemployment. We will work with them, and other partners, to identify which policy solutions they are currently implementing, where the gaps are, and the areas in which policy delivery can be improved.

In researching this booklet, we interviewed one government representative who bewailed the fact that his government had, on the advice of many experts, invested heavily in expanding tertiary level education, only to find that there were now more unemployed university graduates than unemployed primary or secondary school leavers.

This same official complained that, though they had sought to introduce entrepreneurship education, they had yet to find an effective model appropriate for his country.

Such specific challenges will be explored by the campaign through the eyes of five different stakeholder groups: 1) government; 2) the private sector; 3) donors and investors; 4) educators, academics and practitioner professionals; 5) youth themselves.

Combining scores and assessments from each stake-holder will give policy-makers a comprehensive snapshot of the status of youth job creation policies in their country.

Task TWO: Prepare a policy prospectus: The second task will be to work with interested governments to build out of the bench-mark study a prospectus of polices, tailored to national needs. Each will seek to maximize the number of decent youth livelihoods created while also growing each nation’s economy and increasing their tax revenue. The prospectus will draw on the ideas and views of all five stakeholder groups – shaping and re-shaping the suite of policies until all buy into a common and agreed Systems Approach.

Task THREE: Implementation: Armed with a few carefully worked up Country prospectuses from both Low- and Middle-income countries, the campaign will work with each country’s government and stakeholders to mobilise the resources, recruit and train the necessary personnel and oversee the initial implementation of the suite of policies at local, regional and national levels, working with other agencies to capture the learning from each stage of the work. By working with existing institutions and youth themselves, the campaign will keep the cost of implementation as low as possible. A key element of the campaign is to enable the implementation of each country programme to be self-sustaining within a time period of no more than 10 years.

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THE CASE FOR URGENT ACTION ON YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

GOVERNMENT COMMITMENTS

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Ulla Tørnaes Minister for Development Cooperation Denmark - 26 -

THE JOB ASPIRATIONS OF AFRICAN YOUTH MUST BE MET –

IN

ORDER TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT by

Ulla Tørnaes th

On the 8 floor of an industrial building off Ngong Rd in Nairobi, Kenya, I visited a fantastic co-working space for tech entrepreneurs called “Nairobi Garage”. The huge open, bright space and the scent of freshly brewed Kenyan espresso coffee confirmed for me the presence of dynamic, young, successful entrepreneurs - entrepreneurs who genuinely impressed me with their energy, drive and innovative ideas.

These young people have managed to create their own jobs through their own entrepreneurial spirit with the help of investors and their communities. They inspired me, and demonstrated to me the potential of African youth. Unfortunately, these young people only represent a fraction. Many young people in Africa are facing high underemployment and unemployment - a problem that will only increase under the inevitable pressure of demographics: by 2030, around 380 million young Africans will enter the labor market. However, less than a third of these will be able to find jobs in the formal waged sector. More productive and better employment opportunities need to be created to reap the full potential of this demographic youth bulge. Only then will African youth be able to realise their dreams and build a future in their home countries.

Need for action on youth employment in Africa The need for action on youth employment in Africa has never been greater. The world is home to the largest youth generation to date and Africa’s youth population is expected to double to by 2050. This means that a third of the world’s young people will be living in Africa by mid-century. Depending on how we approach it, this can be either a critical challenge or a unique opportunity: with creative policies, the youth bulge can be an unprecedented opportunity for accelerated growth, poverty reduction and better living conditions. Young people are valuable agents and can be a huge resource for finding today’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems. If, however, the aspirations of young people are not met – if they are not given opportunities, not meaningfully engaged and if sufficient resources are not brought into play – then youth can become a source of instability and conflict. Further, if the conditions at home do not fulfill their most basic aspirations, many more youth may opt for perilous migrant journeys to places that do give them the opportunity to achieve their aspirations. Many of these involve risking their lives crossing the desert or wide, dangerous seas.

A focus on youth job creation has been one of Denmark’s top priorities for years.

Last time I was development minister, in 2008, Denmark launched an Africa Commission, which had the key objective of realising the potential of Africa’s youth. The Commission focused on ways to create employment for young people through private sector-led growth and improving the competitiveness of African economies. The Commission discussed how to create decent jobs, promote entrepreneurship, and expand the provision of opportunities for young African women and men through education, skills development and access to finance.

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Unleash the potential of young people Still today, it is a key priority for me to unleash the potential of young people and make the unprecedented opportunity implicit in the demographic dividend a reality.

This is why Denmark, and my agency, have a strong focus on creating jobs for youth.

One example is our support for the African Development Bank’s Jobs for Youth initiative which aims to create 25 million jobs for youth by 2030. In 2018, Denmark supported the initiative with a little over USD $4,100,000. The Jobs for Youth Initiative seeks to increase inclusive employment and entrepreneurship. The initiative focuses especially on young women entrepreneurs who face particular constraints and barriers to accessing finance and creating income-generating opportunities.

What needs to be done? FOUR things: Although job creation initiatives like the ADB’s Jobs for Youth programme are needed, four other related aspects are equally important: ONE: it is essential to focus on promoting inclusive, sustainable growth ensuring that there is a business and regulatory environment that facilitates access to key resources such as credit, infrastructure and markets. An example of how Denmark supports the access to financial credit is through the African Guarantee Fund. This Fund is a nonbank financial institution that provides partial loan guarantees to banks and other financial institutions to facilitate their lending to African SMEs (Small and Mediumsized Enterprises.) It came into operation in 2012 and has already facilitated loan disbursements to almost 8,000 SMEs worth USD $800 million. Of these, about 60% are owned or led by young people. This makes the African Guarantee Fund a substantial and important partner not only in enabling SMEs to play their expected role in fostering African economic development but also in ensuring funding and support for young entrepreneurs. The African Guarantee Fund has launched an ambitious capital mobilization process to address increasing market demand and in 2018, Denmark intends to provide additional share capital.

TWO: it is crucial to offer young people opportunities outside the informal economy.

Currently, 80% of young people in Africa are working in the informal economy without regular, or regulated, payments. These precarious employment conditions result in many young people joining the ranks of the working poor: their limited income is not enough to give them a decent standard of living. The informal sector not only diminishes the productive potential of young people, it also hampers the ability of governments to strengthen the productive environment of their countries in a sustainable way. It is a permanent constraint on their tax revenue and fiscal base. To enable a shift from jobs in the informal to jobs in the formal economy, we need a renewed focus on education, training and skills. We need to learn from previous endeavours and think creatively.

Including youth in fostering the enabling environment for new, disruptive approaches is one of the paths we must take if we are to turn this challenge into an opportunity. We must ensure that young people have the right skills to flourish in existing, and emerging, job markets. Education in information and communication technology (ICT) is needed as 90% of future jobs will require ICT skills. To meet this need, Denmark supports the

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African Girls Can Code, a new initiative, in collaboration with UN Women and the International Telecommunications Union, that seeks to educate girls aged 17-20 in ICT and coding. As these are skills essential in future labour markets, it is crucial to bridge the gender gap in these sectors and ensure that more girls have the necessary tools and knowledge to succeed. Denmark supports the initiative with approximately USD $1,650,000.

A paradigm shift towards development by and with not merely for youth, is central to Denmark’s strategy for Development Cooperation THREE: it is important to engage young people meaningfully in the discussions on how to address the youth unemployment and underemployment challenge. Listening to young people’s aspirations and hearing how they imagine the future for themselves and their peers, is vital if we are to increase the effectiveness of the policies and programmes we develop to target youth employment. Youth are experts in their own aspirations. Fostering an intergenerational dialogue can help unleash these aspirations, and translate them into viable and realizable achievements.

FOUR: Last but not least, the importance of gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and human rights cannot be stressed enough. Girls and young women have to be able to decide freely over their own body and their own life. If girls and young women are to get to where they want, and deserve, to be in the labour market when they wish, they must have access to sexual and reproductive health services. Sexual and reproductive health and rights are not only a human rights imperative: they are a smart economic policy for society at large. Global GDP would increase by 25% if women were given the same opportunities in the sphere of work as men. Everyone stands to gain.

We have come far and there have been many advances. But much still needs to be done. At the World Economic Forum this year, a Gender Gap report told us that if we continue to do “business as usual” in relation to gender, we will wait 217 years to reach gender equality. That is simply too long. We must accelerate the change now.

And we must work together, all of us – governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector and civil society – to create jobs for youth. I know young people are resourceful, innovative and crucial agents of change. This is why a paradigm shift towards development by and with youth, not merely for youth, is central to Denmark’s strategy for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Assistance.

We owe it to young people to create an enabling environment in which they can all realize their potential. Only then will my vision be realised that that every young African woman and man has the opportunity to become an entrepreneur like the ones I met in Nairobi.

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COMMITMENTS by

The Government of Tunisia In June 2016, the IMF has approved a four-year, $2.9 billion loan for Tunisia to support the government’s economic agenda aimed at promoting more inclusive growth and job creation, while protecting the most vulnerable households.

Youssef Chahed Head of Government, Tunisia

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The cohesiveness of communities depends on social and economic development, education and job opportunities, especially for the youth. In this era of globalisation and the information age, where capital and labour are so mobile, no country can afford to undervalue or ignore its human capital.

With a relatively high level of unemployment around 15%, especially among higher education graduates, Tunisia must ensure that early intervention and prevention mechanisms as well as active labour market policies are strengthened to boost investment, competitiveness and social stability to combat uncertainty and instability.

The transition from education to employment is a key phase in a young person’s life.

We are actively working to ensure that proper systems are in place to assist our youth during the challenging journey to secure employment.

Giving our young people the opportunity to direct their talent, enthusiasm and energy into sustainable and rewarding employment is critical to our country’s future.

We want to ensure that our young people, irrespective of their background, gender or education, have equal choices, and chances to enable them to reach their full potential.

We are aware of the asymmetry between abundant labour supply and the expectations of the job market. We are actively working on adapting the supply to the demand as well as getting the academic and professional training sectors to work closer with the business world. This is a team-based process, involving various ministries such as those of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Employment and Vocational Training, and Industry and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises).

We are witnessing the growing impact of innovation, technology and digitalisation on the whole world. Our education system must keep pace with the changing needs and impacts of these new phenomena. To make sure Tunisia stays on track, it’s necessary to determine the "contents" of each training, based on a functional approach that addresses the specific needs created by rapid technological changes.

In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to work simultaneously on all the components of the human resources development system. Hence, we have started the reforms process for our primary and secondary education, higher education and vocational training. We have also implemented several incentives and programmes across various ministries in order to foster entrepreneurship. We expect our parliament to approve a Start-Up Act soon.

Our country is embracing a rapid transformation of its economy and society, with a significant focus on digitalisation. We have what it takes to support and stimulate this transformation. It is a nationwide and collective effort. Improving employment opportunities for young people requires a broad and concerted effort from all stakeholders. While the Government and public sector are primarily responsible for creating an enabling environment for youth employment, employers play a crucial role in the process. Entrepreneurship will be crucial to the future of our youth and our country.

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DEVELOPING THE SKILLS OF A 21ST CENTURY WORKFORCE

by Dr. Slim FERIANI Minister of Industry and SMEs, Tunisia Our country, Tunisia, has 3.000 years of cultural heritage, 1.200 kilometres of Mediterranean coasts, spacious fertile lands (making it the breadbasket of the Roman Empire), considerable natural resources etc. However, our people are our greatest asset and they must be nurtured and looked after carefully. A special focus has always been given to our youth, but never more so than in the past seven years since we embarked on a path to democracy – a path initiated and led by our youth.

Over the past decade, various nations across the world have experienced financial turmoil and unrest, youth alienation, brain drain, illegal immigration etc. Hence, every nation owes it to its youth to offer a social fabric, which is endowed with the necessary tools that ensure protection, trust, opportunities and happiness.

As Minister of Industry and SMEs, I am faced on a regular basis with the need from industrial companies for skilled work force, ideally based near their plants. This demand is estimated at tens of thousands of jobs per year in traditional sectors such as textiles as well as in new and promising sectors such as aeronautics and autos. However, there is a gap between the skills of our abundant labour supply and the requirements of industrial firms. Hence, we are pro-actively working to close the supply-demand skills gap in collaboration with various leading local firms and industry clusters, along with our colleagues in the Ministry of Higher Education and Ministry of Employment and Professional Training as well as. It is a perfect example of Public-Private Partnership.

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We are living through the fourth industrial revolution, which relies on innovation, technology, automation and artificial intelligence. It challenges the old economic and social models. Indeed, over the past few years, the industrial sector has been going through deep changes, in which information and communication technologies (ICT) have taken the driving seat. This new industrial revolution is giving birth to a new generation of industry: Industry 4.0, or Smart Industry, represents a major technological breakthrough and game-changer for the industrial sector globally. This will have decisive consequences on future jobs.

The implementation of Industry 4.0 requires a new generation of employees. They need to be multitalented knowledge workers who not only have technical skills but, additionally, non-technical skills, like communication, problem-solving, decisionmaking and multidisciplinary work and life skills.

In order to remain an African leader in the industrial world and to maintain a globally competitive advantage, we are in the process of implementing a national strategy to help our industrial firms embrace Industry 4.0. We believe that this is the best way to ensure that global champions such as Airbus, Leoni, Yazaki, Henkel etc., and home-grown international champions Coficab and One Tech groups, continue to rely on Tunisia to serve as one of their main and most competitive industrial hubs.

According to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Index 2018, Tunisia is ranked first in Africa in terms of quality of the entrepreneurial environment. We are determined to maintain that leadership position and further encourage the entrepreneurship which, ultimately, could be the best way to employ our youth and help them thrive. It will also keep our country firmly on the path of fair, inclusive and sustainable social and economic development. The upcoming approval by parliament of our Start-up Act will mark a historic step in that direction. In addition, we are enthusiastically encouraging various initiatives such as: 1) innovative and alternative ways to access finance to help start-ups and small businesses, eg. Crowdfunding; 2) nationwide teaching and promotion of ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) issues for our youth, which ultimately will make them better citizens.

Last but not least, and in order to promote entrepreneurship as the major driver for youth employment, we are keen on further valuing and encouraging national champions and success stories such as Wallyscar. This is the first Tunisian car manufacturer set-up barely a dozen years ago in 2006 by two ambitious young Tunisians in their twenties. It was recently voted one of the winners of the Arab Youth Campaign on Innovation Contest organized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Success breeds confidence! Confidence breeds success and hard work pays off.

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A TRIBUTE TO INNOVATIVE TUNISIAN YOUTH ENTREPRENEURS

by Hon. Olfa Soukri Cherif, MP Tunisia, Vice Chair, Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & IMF In the battle of the ideas, Tunisia is climbing up the top-50 of the 2017 Bloomberg Innovation Index, which scores the economies and measures the impact of innovation by multiple factors such as research and development spending and the concentration of high-tech public companies.

Innovation is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that constitutes a creative synthesis between the world of knowledge and technology and the vast expectations of society.

The design phase is a magical moment where the vision of the project materializes into a concrete proposal - the fruit of the entrepreneur's sensitivity, imagination, and inspiration. An excellent example of this is Wallyscar, created in 2016 by two brothers Omar and Zied Guiga. It is the first car manufactured in Africa, and the first in the Arab world to be exported around the world. They draw on a regional ecosystem of automotive suppliers, and are now developing new models including an electric vehicle which will be launched at the end of 2018.

Wallyscar and its inventors – Zied and Omar Guiga

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I would like to offer a tribute to three other young Tunisian entrepreneurs in the following areas: the internet of things, agriculture and energy.

Emna Ben Ali

Mohamed Nejib Gaddes

Maher Damak

In 2017, Emna Ben Ali, 25 years, became the youngest winner of the Women Entrepreneurs Trophy of Tunisia for a project related to the internet of things. It involves industrial automation, the production of electronic cards and the centralization of public lighting via the internet. Her idea to apply the internet of things to public lighting is an innovation that reduces energy consumption, lowers the public lighting budget, and makes the task of maintenance workers considerably easier.

Mohamed Nejib Gaddes has registered two patents for recovery of olive oil waste.

The first patent relates to depollution and transformation of the "marjine"(olive waste) in a way that does not affect the water table. The second one focuses on recycling olive oil waste into biomass and biodiesel – clean energy products with high added value which are then exported to the European market. This patented and globally recognized know-how is an opportunity for Tunisia to position itself as a global leader in clean, green, environmentally-responsible agriculture. In 2016, Tunisia won the Extra Virgin Olive Oil Award for its organic oil.

Maher Damak, a 28-year-old Tunisian doctoral candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), won first prize in both the United States Department of Energy's national competition and the annual MIT competition. He has been ranked among the top 30 innovators under 30 in the world by Forbes. He invented a system for recovering water from steam emissions from power stations: the technology recovers 80% of the water from a 250 megawatt plant (the equivalent of about 1000 to 2000 liters per minute). In addition to this technology, Damak has developed and patented the system to reduce the use of pesticides in agriculture from 100 liters per hectare to 10 liters per hectare.

ÓÎ ÏÒ - 35 -

THE MOUBADIROUN PROJECT

by Faouzi Abderrahman Minister of Vocational Training and Employment In Tunisia, the National Employment Agency launched the employment fund to support the salaries of newly-hired employees by giving direct subsidies for, mainly, higher education diplomas and also offering the tools of entrepreneurship to youth by training coaching and accompanying until the launching and entering the market.

The “Moubadiroun” Project is an initiative designed by the Ministry of Vocational Training and Employment to highlight the importance of national strategy for integrated and multi-sectoral employment.

• Integrated: it responds to the constraints related to job demand (supporting and improving the employability of job seekers) on the one hand and stimulates job creation in value chains and provides support for the creation micro-enterprises on the other hand • Multi-sectoral: Seven Ministries are partners in the design and implementation of the project, under the leadership of the Ministry of Vocational Training and Employment.

The project aims to improve economic opportunities for disadvantaged youth in 7 regions: Manouba, Jendouba, Séliana, Kasserine, Kairouan, Sfax and Kebili and aims to reduce the gap between women and men for access to job opportunities. It’s targets: • 10,000 young people aged between 18 and 35, living in one of the selected gubernatorial districts, with a scoring mechanism to give priority to young people in vulnerable situations • 250 micro, small & medium enterprises in the development of 4 value chains The project will last for 6 years and its implementation will allow us to: • Create 9,700 direct/indirect jobs through the development of 4 value chains • Improve the employability of 10,000 young people, and enhance their connection to the job market whether in salaried jobs or independent selfemployment, through the creation of 2,200 micro-enterprises.

• Strengthen the capacities of the public and associated actors involved in the implementation of the project.

Message to the Global Campaign from

The Government of Seychelles [Department for Youth and Sports]

The Department for Youth and Sports is responsible for ensuring the holistic development of the youth in general and also the young athletes in the Sports industry of Seychelles.

The Department’s mandate is to support and facilitate measurable improvement in all sectors working for and with the young people. It involves enhancing economic gains for young people, through better coordination of services, catering for their needs, introducing youth friendly policies that cut across all sectors relevant to their development. The National Youth Policy Forum (NYPF), the Seychelles National Youth Council (SNYC), the Seychelles National Sports Council (NSC) along with other Non-Governmental organizations (NGOS) essentially ensure the implementation of the policies.

The Department is also tasked with addressing social issues faced by youth. It invests in young people, so that they may in turn, contribute towards the economic, social and cultural advancement of the country. The Department coordinates, monitors and evaluates the efficiency and effectiveness of the performance of policies and programmes of the main institutions that work with young people. It does this through the NYPF - a multi-sectoral working group made up of Chief Executives from all youth-related sectors (i.e. decision makers from Education, Entrepreneurship, Health etc.)

In Seychelles, the working population consists of mostly young people contributing towards its economic growth and development. There is not a real lack of employment opportunities as the country currently hosts about 17,000 expatriate workers. A recent National Survey based on the well-being and quality of life for young people showed that, in general, this group felt that the education system was providing a good enough foundation to enable them to secure decent jobs. However, the same survey found that a significant number of young people had failed to perform well enough at school and were thus facing difficulties in securing the employment of their choice because they were unqualified, under-qualified or, to some extent, unskilled.

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Several government and non-governmental organizations are tasked with helping this group of vulnerable young people. The Youth and Sports Department works with all these organisations on youth employment, but its main partners are: The Seychelles National Youth Council (SNYC) which has two units aimed at promoting youth employment. These are the Employment Initiative Unit (which compliments an existing structure established by the Employment Department) and the Youth Entrepreneurship Programme, which provides support and guidance to those who wish to join the private business sector.

The Department of Employment, which is mandated to build a productive workforce and to promote decent work in the country, achieves this through activities and programmes such as the Decent Work Country Programme.

The Youth Entrepreneurship Programme is mandated to help develop an entrepreneurial spirit in youths by providing training in entrepreneurship and facilitating access for business start-ups to funding through grants and low interest loans.

The contribution of SNYC Information provided by the SNYC showed that during the year 2017, 104 young people visited the Employment Initiative Unit expressing interest in securing employment. 54 youth applied for jobs of which 20 were called for interviews.

Following up with the other 34 youth showed that some did not receive any reply to their application whilst others were advised that they had not made it to the interview stage. Among the 20, only 6 were successful. It is important to note that the young people were advised by the SNYC whether or not they met the required criteria.

However some insisted on applying in spite of the SNYC’s advice.

In addition, the Employment Initiative Unit recorded that 50 youth who visited their office did so for the purpose of being assisted for CV-writing, the drafting of application letters and, for some, financial assistance to get to job interviews. Of the 50, 19 youth were under the age of 18 and were therefore advised to go to the Ministry of Employment for enrolment in other programmes.

The Youth Entrepreneurship Unit is mandated to help develop and nurture an entrepreneurial spirit in youths by providing training in entrepreneurship and facilitating access for business start-ups to funding through grants and low interest loans. Statistics show that the unit has assisted 73 young entrepreneurs from 2015 to 2017 to set up businesses in agriculture, food handling, tailoring, retail, printing and decorating, filming/photography, air conditioning and refrigeration, beauty salons and barber shops, IT and mobile repair, fishing and excursions, and welding.

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The contribution of the Department of Employment The Employment Department has 4 main schemes which targets and promotes youth employment. It introduced the My First Job Scheme in 2016, aimed at encouraging employers to recruit inexperienced students from professional educational centres upon completion of their studies. The Government’s aim at implementing such a scheme was to help young people in securing decent jobs, gaining important career skills and also developing interest in entrepreneurship. Under the scheme, the government refunds 40% of the salaries of each young graduate employed by private companies or those self-employed for a period of one year, for monthly salaries of up to a maximum of SCR 7000 (around USD $500, depending on the exchange rate).

In 2010, a Skills Development Programme (SDP) was introduced to provide skills development and re-skilling opportunities for two categories of jobseekers: i) school dropouts and jobseekers with secondary school level education aged 15 to 30 years – and – ii) jobseekers with post-secondary level education but with no work experience.

In 2014 the programme was evaluated and reviewed and a new SDP was implemented in April 2016, encapsulating the school drop outs and unemployed individuals who have not actively searched for work for a minimum of 3 years (e.g. welfare claimants/ recipients, ex-convicts amongst other vulnerable groups, including those with skills in a particular area which is no longer in demand).

Statistics show that in 2016, out of the 160 participants (Male= 61, Female=99), 48 completed (Male=14, Female=34), 71 dropped out (Male=31, Female=71). Only 41 participants are still enrolled on the programme (Male=15, Female=26). In the year 2017, the statistic is unclear as the cohort is still ongoing.

The Flexible Employment Programme (FEP) was initiated in November 2013, with the aim of helping young single parents to be placed in employment under flexible working hours. Since its implementation, a total of 36 candidates have been placed on the programme. Of the 36, 22 candidates dropped out and 9 secured employment. 8 new participants started on the programme on the 1st April, 2016, but as of January 2017 there were only 4 remaining participants. With the closure of the St. Anne Hotel, one of the initial key partners, there are now new participants on the scheme. With the restructuring of the division responsible for the FEP, and the re-introduction of the Unemployment Relief Scheme (URS) in 2017, there is a need to revamp the FEP to ensure that no youth is left without an employment option.

In conclusion, the Seychelles can claim that it is trying very hard to provide all its youth with employment opportunities. Although faced with many challenges, it is the duty and responsibility of the Youth Department, along with its key partners from the Employment and Entrepreneurship sector and the Education department, to keep searching and finding solutions to mitigate the adverse effects of the country’s dynamic and ever-changing social and economic landscape on youth employment.

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Message of Support from

The Government of the United Republic of Tanzania

Prime Minister’s Office [Labour, Youth, Employment and Persons with Disability] for the

Global Campaign for Youth Employment (GCYE) To: Honourable Jeremy Lefroy MP We wish to express our grateful appreciation for the invitation to participate and contribute to this very important global campaign for youth employment.

Tanzania, like any other developing country, is facing a youth unemployment challenge, in which, out of 22.3 million people who are economically active, 15 million (67.1%) are youth with an unemployment rate of 11.7%. Almost 90% of the employed persons are in either subsistence agriculture (66.3%) or in the informal sector (21.7%) For the past decade, Tanzania has recorded impressive economic growth averaging 7% GDP growth each year. But this growth rate has not been translated into significant employment creation, and results in high youth unemployment rates, particularly in urban areas. It also results in increased informal sector employment amongst youth.

Given this background, the Government of Tanzania supports the initiative of the Global Campaign for Youth Employment and is ready to learn, share experience, and adapt successful policy interventions resulting from this initiative.

With this letter, the Government of Tanzania would like to thank you for considering our Country in this very important initiative.

Your Excellency, please accept my kindest regards, Peter G. Kalonga, Ag. PERMANENT SECRETARY

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Message from

The Government of Ghana In Africa, the number of youth is growing rapidly. In 2015, 226 million youth aged 15-24 lived in Africa, accounting for 19% of the global youth population. By 2030, it is projected that the number of youth in Africa will have increased by 42%. Africa’s youth population is expected to continue to grow throughout the remainder of the 21st century, more than doubling from current levels by 2055.

According to the September 2016 McKinsey report on Africa, “Lions on the move – Realizing the potential of Africa’s Economies”, it is estimated that, by 2050, the continent will have a working-age population that exceeds that of China and India.

The Ghana 2015 Labour Force Survey states the youth constitute 35.9% of the population of the country. The Government recognises that the youth are a veritable and critical human resource with a global outlook that could be channelled for the national development agenda.

Empowering the youth with the knowledge and skills to play a full role in nationbuilding is therefore of paramount importance to the development of Ghana. Currently, 16.9% of the youth are estimated to be unemployed, and given the high youth labour under-utilisation rate of 42%, the proportion of unemployed youth could be more.

In the Government’s bid to tackle youth unemployment and under-employment Ghana in 2006 established the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) which is now operating as the Youth Employment Agency Scheme (YEA). The YEA was established to empower youth to contribute meaningfully to the socio-economic and sustainable development of Ghana. The objective is to support Ghanaian youth aged 15 to 35 years to transit from unemployment to employment through skills training and internship modules. They are responsible for developing guidelines for the implementation of an integrated, innovative national youth employment programme.

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The YEA is also responsible for setting the standards and procedures for youth employment and career development in the country. They connect youth with skillstraining both within and outside the country. The YEA also serve as a one-stop shop for youth employment and entrepreneurial development, and it takes into consideration gender and persons with disability.

To further ensure youth employment remains at the centre of Ghana’s national development, the National Youth Policy ensures comprehensive development of the youth; its medium-term objective is to create opportunities for youth to participate effectively in national socio-economic development and political governance.

Government through the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan (NEIP) supports and incubates young people’s businesses with a supportive ecosystem for young Ghanaian entrepreneurs aged 35 years and below. Bills have been passed to allow tax holidays of up to five years for young entrepreneurs, granted on the basis of the number of people employed by the start-up. Tax credits and other incentives have also been introduced for companies that hire young graduates from tertiary institutions.

In showing its commitment to the creation of jobs for the youth, the government has instituted a buy-local policy for Government agencies with regards to ICT, to ensure that applications and software are procured from local ICT firms.

Other specific measures pursued include equipping youth with employable skills; strengthening the link between education and labour markets; building the capacity of the youth to discover opportunities; creating youth desks at the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) so that youth can access reliable labour market information; strengthening key national institutions, including the National Youth Authority (NYA) and the YEA, enabling them to discharge their mandates effectively; and building integrated youth centres in all districts to serve as information hubs for youth development. Other interventions include: introducing entrepreneurial skills training; rebranding, creating awareness of, and encouraging, science, and facilitating the creation of partnerships between educational institutions and Ghanaian corporations through attachments, internships and volunteer opportunities; increasing quality of and access to post-basic education skills training; providing apprenticeships and employable skills training for out-of-school youth and graduates; and providing resources for the youth to participate in modern agriculture.

Ghana has had a variety of funds and business support services designed to help business, especially start-up businesses owned by young entrepreneurs. These include Youth Enterprise Support, the Youth & Social Enterprise Fund, the Youth Construction Enterprise Fund, and the Youth Enterprise Support (YES) Initiative.

There will now be a new Youth Enterprises Fund (YEF) and also industrial parks in all regions to provide funding and business development services for young people wishing to start-up a business. These parks are to provide the young Ghanaian entrepreneur with access to workspaces, equipment and basic services, including electricity and water.

This in brief is a summary of Ghana’s actions and future plans to be implemented in our bid to address the problem of youth unemployment and to ensure the youth of Ghana are well-positioned to contribute effectively to the development of the country.

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THE CASE FOR URGENT ACTION ON YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

RESEARCH

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FINDINGS

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THE EVIDENCE IS IN How should youth employment programmes in low-income countries be designed? by Louise Fox and Upaasna Kaul (USAID) – 26/9/2017 Summarised by David Woollcombe, Editor Why youth employment programmes are important: In the paper, Louise Fox states that “A positive youth trajectory concludes with the development of a mature adult who has a positive sense of self, has developed agency and impulse control and a set of core competencies and skills for engaging effectively with the economy, society and the demands and challenges of everyday life. A negative trajectory does not develop self-esteem and agency and concludes with risky and/or destructive behaviour such as teen pregnancy, crime and violence, self-destructive health habits, and disengagement from society, all of which can lead to household poverty and lower economic growth.”

“This is why youth development is such an important economic development issue. This paper examines one aspect of the trajectory: how to equip youth with the skills and support that encourage a successful transition from school to a stable and rewarding livelihood.”

The particular challenge for youth in Low Income Countries (LICs): “Youth growing up in low-income countries are at a disadvantage in transitioning to adulthood: although educational attainment is rising, the quality of that education is often weak and is not usually designed to build the socio-emotional and problem-solving skills that help youth navigate a changing economic landscape. Increased educational enrolment has generated greater aspirations for wage employment, but owing to their nascent structural transformation, the economies of most low-income countries are structured around household farms and businesses which offer limited opportunities for wage employment.” The opportunities for youth are a function of the overall set of employment opportunities in a country; interventions that prepare youth for waged employment may not, therefore, have much success in solving the youth employment challenge.

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This chart illustrates that challenge in low-income countries (LICs): owing to a shortage of firms, only 19% of youth can expect to enter a wage jobs, while in high income countries, 86% can look forward to waged jobs. That 19% figure is likely to rise a few points during their lifetimes but not fast enough to absorb the million or so young people who come in to the labour market every month in Sub-Saharan Africa. So, training youth for jobs that don’t exist is a waste of their time and government money.

Mixed Livelihoods: “A ‘job’ can be realistically defined as ‘activities that generate income - actual or imputed, monetary or in kind (food/meals), in a formal or informal setting.’ Most youth hold multiple jobs in what’s known as a ‘mixed livelihood.’ But a job is more than an income: it confers on a person their sense of identity, status, selfconfidence, connections to others in the community, and overall satisfaction with life.

So outcomes of employment programmes should measure all of that. But they often don’t.”

Time-lag between Economic Transformation and Employment Transformation: As a country gets richer, the share of the labour force working in the informal economy or Household Enterprises (HEs) and on farms declines and the number of jobs in the formal enterprise sector rise. But Fox marshals evidence to show that even if an LIC achieves 5% pa growth, it will take them 332 years to achieve the same level of formal sector employment as an Upper Middle Income country. A modest rise of 10% in formal sector employment would take 111 years to achieve. Such projections should convince policy-makers and donors working in LICs to focus on interventions that help the informal, household farms and business sector. For, in the short and medium term, it is higher productivity and higher incomes in these sectors that will reduce poverty.

How do we know what’s working? Participant outcomes say little about whether and why an intervention works. Impact evaluation – where a control group provides a counterfactual - is needed. Many impact evaluations use Random Control Trials (RCTs); as they measure one or more outcomes: a. transition from unemployment into employment b. increase in hours worked, either in single jobs or mixed livelihoods; c. increased earnings either from in single or multiple jobs / mixed livelihoods; d. improvement in working conditions: income, safety, work/life balance, etc.”

They usually don’t measure broader aspects of employment or youth development, despite their importance to youth and society.

Displacement: Fox brilliantly elaborates the problem of “displacement.” Many job creation and training interventions simply ‘displace’ an older worker from an existing job and replace him/her with a younger worker. She finds that, in the evaluations or the planning, many interventions do not factor in displacement in spite of the fact that many interventions do not increase total employment, they just change who does the

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job. She argues that displacement effects are important in estimating the true impact and cost-benefit of an employment program. They are rarely considered perhaps because, if they were, many programmes would be revealed to be a waste of money.

The Evidence of what’s NOT working: Louise Fox admits that the evidence in her paper tells us more about what is NOT working than what is. Her key point is that if training, however good, is for jobs that don’t exist (or jobs that would be filled anyway), it is not job creation. She also finds that some of that evidence is contradictory: “Sometimes skills training helped youth find jobs; sometimes it did not; sometimes cash grants and access to finance helped boost employment – but, over time, the control groups seem to catch up so, over the long-term, the impact is small.” She also notes that “almost no impact evaluations have been done for programmes to help youth develop a sustainable livelihood in farming. Also missing from many studies is any measure for cost-effectiveness.” Also, though her paper claims “The Evidence is in…” she makes more than 20 calls in it for “more research.”

Focus on Self-employment & Household Enterprises: As much as 70% of populations of LICs reside in rural areas. Education levels are low, but most of these economies have high potential for household and national income growth.

Employment strategies should therefore emphasize the development of mixed livelihood strategies in household farms and firms. They should also provide access to start-up funds and possibly to land. Employment strategies should also experiment with low-cost information and counselling programmes to move youth more quickly into self-employment. Fox believes: “We must have education reform to stress more experiential learning of ‘employability’ skills and practical applications of cognitive skills. It is possible that incorporating a stronger emphasis on job ‘know-how’ into general education may prove to be a cheaper way to achieve gains in employability for youth. It might also help youth to have work experience opportunities in secondary schools through internship and apprenticeships.”

Supply-side Interventions - are mostly about training: training in vocational and technical skills, business, life, employability and non-cognitive skills, counselling and mentoring services for either self- or waged employment, transport subsidies to help youth search for jobs, skills matching etc.

Fox’s central point is that supply-side interventions that assume that the business climate is adequate and firms are creating jobs and that the only problem is that there not enough sufficiently qualified youth to fill them, is “self-evidently untrue in LICs.” A supply-side technical training intervention is helpful only if it equips youth with the skills needed to fill the vacancies that actually exist and would not otherwise be filled.

Fox finds the evidence from the multiplicity of supply-side interventions “not encouraging. The unemployment of large numbers of educated youth, or their presence in an informal economy, is caused by the lack of jobs, not by the characteristics of the job-seekers. While some apprenticeship schemes and skills-

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matching efforts may help some youth, the real need is to increase the supply of jobs on offer from the demand-side.”

Demand-side Interventions - are designed to improve factors outside the control of the labour force participants. They help firms expand or new firms to enter. For example, easing access to finance, reducing taxation, management training, mentoring, and incubation services to raise the profitability of firms, have been shown to help firms to expand and hire more employees. For the self-employed, business climate interventions such as construction of markets or roads, or financial inclusion reforms, may benefit actual, or potential, self-employed business owners by increasing their choice of activity, earnings potential, and decreasing risks. The choice of demand-side intervention should be guided by a carefully worked-out theory of change for each country, and each rural and urban area.

“Does Gender Matter?” Of course. Women’s aspirations, and the socio-emotional skills to act upon them, are formed early in life. In the short-to-medium-term, female beneficiaries respond more positively to training interventions than their male counterparts. A recent impact evaluation carefully disaggregated results by gender in an intervention in the Dominican Republic (Acevedo et al., 2017). The evaluation found improved earnings and employment effects on women in the treatment group, but these evaporated after three years when the control group caught up. However, females in the treatment group gained in wealth relative to the control group, indicating that the short-run employment effect led to long-term economic well-being. The surveys detected no positive employment or earnings effects for males in either treatment group. Neither did the males in the survey show an improvement in soft skills as a result of treatment, where the females did in both the 1-year and 3-year surveys. With gains to employment disappearing in the follow up, the assumption that training is the preferred intervention for women is not supported by the evidence, even if training accelerates women’s entry into employment (in some cases).

What do we know about Programmes that help youth enter Self Employment?

“Household farms, small firms and self-employment will, over the next decade at least, provide the majority of new jobs in Africa – with many entering through informal apprenticeships arranged privately with family, friends or neighbours. Informal apprenticeships are not ideal job creators, first because apprentices need capital to go independent and if they cannot find it, they work longer for their trainer at lower wages. Second, apprenticeships perpetuate gender segregation with males working in carpentry, metal-working etc. where they earn a whole lot more than females working in tailoring, hair dressing etc.” Fox finds evidence that, though some training for selfemployment works, the surprising result is that cash may work just as well.

Youth complain that the start-up capital constraint is the biggest obstacle to starting a self-employment business. By far the simplest approach to alleviating this is through grant or loan finance: an evaluation of six microfinance programmes rolled out in areas

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where microfinance was previously unavailable showed that, while they had no effect on the earnings of existing business, they did help people start business.

Evidence on other youth employment interventions: ● Basic Skills: Mastery of basic cognitive skills (literacy, numeracy) is a prerequisite to mastering business or vocational skills. The poor quality of education in many LICs and LMICs is one reason why business skills training programmes are often found to be ineffective. ● Who should implement employment programmes? Two reviews have found that programmes implemented by public sector agencies show less success than those implemented by NGOs. NGOs, however, may lack the administrative capacity and financial resources to bring their programmes to scale. Public sector agencies tend to have both capabilities, but not the performance, focus or dedication to the task found in NGOs. To bridge this gap, Nepal developed a hybrid option, the Employment Fund - a semiautonomous agency which contracts private training operators to train youth who are under- or unemployed. Contracts are performance-based so if the participants do not get a job or start a business, the contractor does not get full payment. The programme has been successful at a very reasonable cost. ● School-based interventions: there is evidence that these help: two programmes in Uganda, Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents and EDUCATE!, bolstered character skills and offered career guidance on labour market opportunities in secondary schools or as after-school programmes.

These have been proven to accelerate youth’s transition into the household production sector at very low cost.

CONCLUSIONS: The best opportunities for improving youth employment outcomes in the near term appear to be: • Policies and projects that increase inward investment and thus the number of modern, labour-intensive enterprises by – 1) helping established firms to grow and hire more workers – and – 2) encouraging new firms to enter into operation.

• Programmes to help youth more rapidly enter and make money in the household production sector (farm and non-farm). Of these, easing access to finance combined with brief practical business start-up training, as well as programmes to develop negotiation, communication, client service, and other soft skills, seem to hold the most promise as a cost-effective approach.

• Skills training and Technical and Vocational Training programmes need to be used sparingly, if at all, with a clear eye on cost-effectiveness and the issue of displacement.

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ÓÎ ÏÒ

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Britain’s shaky economy Time to scrap affirmative action Bjorn Kjos, the Viking Stelios Iran’s fake messiahs 27 April 2013

economist.com

Criminal bumblees

Generation Jobless

The global rise of youth unemployment

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Generation jobless th

The Economist Magazine - April 27 2013 [ Reprinted with permission: though this article is 5 years old, the policy solutions proposed remain valid, even though some of the statistics presented have changed.]

HELDER PEREIRA is a young man with no work and few prospects: a 21-yearold who failed to graduate from high school, he lost his job on a building site four months ago. With his savings about to run out, he has come to his local employment centre in the Paris suburb of Sevran to sign on for benefits and get help finding something to do. He’ll get the cash. Work is another matter. Youth unemployment in Sevran is over 40%.

A continent away in Athlone, a gritty Cape Town suburb, Nokhona, a young South African mother of two, lacks a “matric” or high-school qualification, and has been out of work since October 2010, when her contract as a cleaner in a coffee shop expired.

She hopes for a job as a maid, and has sought help from DreamWorker, a charity that tries to place young jobseekers in work. A counsellor helps Nokhona brush up her interview skills. But the jobless rate among young black South Africans is probably around 55%.

The problem of youth unemployment has been getting worse for several years. But there are at last some reasons for hope. The world now has a real chance of introducing an education-and-training revolution worthy of the scale of the problem.

Governments are trying to address the mismatch between education and the labour market but closing the gap will require a change of attitude from business as well.

Some companies are beginning to take more responsibility for investing in the young: IBM has sponsored a school in New York. McDonald’s has an ambitious new training scheme. India’s IT giant, Infosys, plans to train 45,000 new employees a year, including 14,000 at a time at its main campus in Mysore. Americana Group, a regional food and restaurant company with headquarters in Kuwait, allows trainees to spend up to half their time at work and the rest in college. Others are revamping their training programmes and using technology to help democratise education and training: programmes designed around computer games can give youngsters some virtual experience, and online courses can help apprentices combine on-the-job training with academic instruction. However, the fear that employees will be poached by other companies discourages many firms from investing in the young. There are ways of getting around this: for example, groups of employers can co-operate with colleges to design training courses.

“YOUNG people ought not to be idle. It is very bad for them,” said Margaret Thatcher in 1984. She was right: those who start their careers on the dole are more likely to have lower wages and more spells of joblessness later in life, because they lose out on the chance to acquire skills and self-confidence in their formative years.

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Yet more young people are idle than ever. The number of young people without a job has risen by 30% since 2007 and disengaged young people cost economies. One estimate suggests that, in 2011, the economic loss from youth unemployment in Europe amounted to $153 billion - more than 1% of GDP. Emerging economies, that have the largest and fastest-growing populations of young people, also have the worst-run labour markets. Almost half of the world’s young people live in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. They also have the highest share of young people out of work or in the informal sector. The result is an “arc of unemployment”, from Southern Europe through North Africa and the Middle East to South Asia, where the rich world’s recession meets the poor world’s youthquake.

The anger of the young jobless burst onto the streets in the Middle East in the Arab Spring. Morocco, Egypt and other north African and Middle Eastern countries have among the worst rates in the emerging world. Violent crime, generally in decline in the rich world, is rising in Spain, Italy and Portugal—countries with startlingly high youth unemployment. Though they are at different stages of development, these countries all suffer disproportionately from employment’s main curses: low growth, clogged labour markets and a mismatch between education and work.

Skills Matching: Employers are awash with applications—but complain that they cannot find candidates with the right abilities. McKinsey reports that only 43% of the employers in the nine countries that it has studied in depth (America, Brazil, Britain, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) think that they can find enough skilled entry-level workers. Middle-sized firms (between 50 and 500 workers) have an average of 13 entry-level jobs empty.

Mismatch and training gaps may explain why over the past five years youth unemployment in flexible economies like America and Britain has risen more than in previous recessions and stayed high. Britain has one of the world’s most flexible labour markets but has more than twice as many young unemployed as Germany (11.5% of the labour force vs.3.9%). This is perhaps because Britain has a longstanding prejudice against practical education: in 2009 only about 8% of English employers trained apprentices compared with four times that number in Germany. 29% of British employers say work experience is “critical” but the share of British children who do it has been falling for the past 15 years. Only 7% of pupils say they had any mentoring from a local employer and only 19% had visited one. In France few highschool leavers have any real experience of work.

Another more subtle reason is the over-emphasis some governments make on University education: in North Africa, universities focus on preparing their students to fill civil-service jobs even as companies complain about the shortage of technical skills. There is also a glut of graduates: the unemployment rate in Morocco is five times higher for graduates as it is for people with only a primary education.

The most obvious way to tackle this problem is to reignite growth. Joblessness in southern Europe has surged as economies have shrunk. South Africa’s high jobless rate is stoked by the fact that it is now one of Africa’s slowest-growing economies. But reigniting growth is easier said than done in a world plagued by debt, and is anyway

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only a partial answer. The countries where the problem is worst (such as Spain and Egypt) suffered from high youth unemployment even when their economies were growing. This underlines the importance of three other solutions: reform labour markets, use technology and improve education. These are familiar prescriptions, but ones that need to be delivered with both a new vigour and a new twist.

1) Deregulating labour markets is central to tackling youth unemployment: rigid labour markets in countries that let business cartels curb competition, place high taxes on labour, enforce high minimum wages or impose regulations that make it hard to fire people, are bad places for the young jobless. In India big factories and firms face around 200 state and federal laws governing work and pay. South Africa has notably strict laws on firing. North Africa and the Middle East suffer from a bloated and overregulated public sector, heavy taxes on labour and high minimum wages. Alongside deregulation, incentivizing youth employment helps: Germany, which has the secondlowest level of youth unemployment in the rich world, pays a proportion of the wages of the long-term unemployed for the first two years. The Nordic countries provide young people with “personalised plans” to get them into employment or training. But these policies are too expensive to reproduce in southern Europe, with their millions of unemployed, let alone the emerging world. A cheaper approach is to reform labourhungry bits of the economy—for example, by making it easier for small businesses to get licences and construction permits.

2) Use Technology: Technology makes it easier to take work to people who live in work-deprived areas or who are shut out of the market by cartels. For example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an internet marketplace, enables companies to hire workers to perform simple tasks such as identifying people in photographs. They can take part from anywhere.

3) Improve Education: Across the OECD, people who left school at the earliest opportunity are twice as likely to be unemployed as university graduates. In many developing countries, those figures are reversed.

What matters is not just number of years of education people get, but its content.

This means expanding the study of STEM subjects and closing the gap between the world of education and the world of work—for example by upgrading vocational and technical education and by forging closer relations between companies and schools.

Germany does that and Korea has now introduced “meister” schools; Singapore has boosted technical colleges, and Britain is expanding apprenticeships and trying to improve technical education.

It is hard to be optimistic about a problem that is blighting the lives of so many people. But it is perhaps time to be a bit less pessimistic.

Policymakers know what to do to diminish the problem

1. Ignite growth 2. Break down cartels 3. Build bridges between education and work - 54 -

House House of Commons International Development Committee

Jobs & Livelihoods

Twelfth Report of Session 2014 - 2015 In 2006, the 14 Parliamentary Members of the Intl. Development Committee produced a report on Private Sector Development which criticised DfID for its reliance on investment climate reforms as a means to create jobs: “This is insufficient to reach the groups who are most in need, especially young people. The Department should seek to build partnerships with governments and companies that closely link education with job creation.” In 2014-15, the Committee produced a report on Jobs & Livelihoods and the final chapter was devoted to the issue of youth un- and under-employment.

Very few of its recommendations have been implemented to date so, as they are based on field research and evidence sessions with practitioners, they remain very relevant.

Youth unemployment World Bank and ILO statistics tell us that 75 million young people are registered unemployed, 620 million are not in training or seeking work and 600 million will enter the job market in the next decade with only 200 million jobs awaiting them. The Zambian Minister of Finance, Alexander Chikwanda, called youth unemployment “a ticking time bomb for all of us.” The UN has stated that 'large numbers of unemployed youths are a potential source of insecurity given their vulnerability to recruitment into criminal and violent activities.' It is essential to facilitate dynamic structural change to create jobs for youth. By doing so, the youth bulge can be transformed into a demographic dividend, and the demographic time-bomb can be defused.

Several NGOs told us that one of the major problems for youth job creation is the lack of statistics on the issue. The 2007 World Development Report on Development

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and the Next Generation stated on its first page, “One of the biggest challenges in writing this Report was that the evidence base was uneven. There were very few rigorous evaluations of youth programmes and policies for any of the issues covered in the Report. The Bank’s inventory of over 750 youth employment interventions found that less than 3% measured for cost-effectiveness and many had no evaluation at all.”

Professor Michael Grimm wrote an OECD Evaluation Insight paper “Do We Know how to create Youth Jobs?” and answers: “No. First and foremost, our review underlines how little we actually know about how to create jobs.”

We questioned representatives from youth organisations why so little was known.

Andrew Devenport of Youth Business International said: “Youth employment, and the study of youth employment, is a relatively new area, and has only emerged as a focus since the World Bank World Development Report in 2007.” As a result, he believed the field had suffered from a “lack of investment in research and monitoring evaluation” and “poor project design.”

Peace Child International (PCI) said there was a need for longitudinal evaluations, because “interventions made at age 16 or 17 may not bear fruit until young people are 25 or 26.” DFID’s research department could apply to youth the longitudinal kind of evaluations that it had taken up with younger children. PCI recommended that: “Government and institutional economists representing donors and institutions like the World Bank need hard, rigorously-sourced data of the kind that DFID’s research teams are well-placed to provide.”

DFID policy The problem of youth unemployment is a major priority for most of the countries in which DFID works. On our Committee’s visit to Sierra Leone and Liberia in 2014, both President Ernest Bai Koroma and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf highlighted youth unemployment as a major concern for them as a potential trigger for the return to civil war. We found that even in these countries where DFID was meant to be working in alignment with national priorities, it was not working on the issue. It had been invited to do so by other donors through the Partner Group on Youth Employment but had declined.

Peace Child International told us that youth did not appear to be a priority in DFID’s thinking. It said that: “Of DFID’s Economic Development Strategy Framework (EDSF) Pillars, only Pillar Five, “ensuring growth is inclusive”, references the young – and then only as one of nine groups. So, while 60 to 70% of the populations of DFID’s target countries are young, they appear as a mere 2.2% of the EDSF focus. Youth unemployment is not mentioned at all.”

PCI recommended that DFID needs to create a position for a senior level youth policy adviser, noting that the UN now had a Special Representative on Youth and the European Commission at DG DEVCO had a youth adviser. It said there was not currently “enough passion and energy at DFID driving the youth employment agenda.”

Potential policy options Filmer and Fox’s research on Youth Employment in sub Saharan Africa said that 83% of new jobs will be created in household enterprises (family or individually-run

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micro- enterprises), 9% in government and public services and 8% in formal private sector waged employment.

However, from studying DFID’s Development tracker website, several NGOs told us that current DFID spending is overly-skewed towards formal, private sector, waged employment and the enabling environment – not family or individually-run household enterprises where youth jobs are to emerge.

YBI found: “The majority focus of the five EDSF pillars is on larger-scale, macro interventions that enable growth rather than deliver job creation directly. Certainly a conducive policy, legal, regulatory and institutional environment is central for markets to work and businesses to grow, but DFID also has an important direct programming role to catalyse growth that is not comprehensively addressed in the Framework.”

© Youth Business International’s Youth Job Creation Machine

Both PCI and YBI had clear policy solutions for DFID to help young people to create their own employment through entrepreneurship which required direct support as well as better education in the skills required to prosper in the informal economy.

Both urged DFID to consider solutions that could be delivered at scale. As David Robalinho, Senior Policy Advisor in the Solutions4 Youth Employment team at the World Bank said: “The youth employment problem is in the millions but our solutions remain in the thousands….”

Encouraging entrepreneurship through education and skills training for the informal economy YBI said: “Entrepreneurship is part of the youth employment solution – particularly in developing countries where other job options are less viable and the informal sector makes up a substantial share of the economy.”

DFID puts resources into improving access to primary and junior secondary education. Our experience suggests that there is a failure of school systems. Francis Teal of Oxford University said: “Those most dissatisfied by their job prospects are the newly educated young. There are two possible reasons for this. [...] One is that the

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education is of such low quality that it fails to produce skills of value in the market place. The second is that there is a mismatch between the type of jobs being created and the education supplied.”

PCI would like to see skills for self-employment taught in schools and other community spaces, reporting that: “Education, as it exists in those countries, does not educate for self-employment; it educates for waged employment. When 83% of jobs are not in waged employment, that is self-evidently unwise. There needs to be much more education for enterprise start-ups, [...] self-employment and self-reliance.”

Andrew Devenport of YBI gave the example of a type of schooling in Paraguay: “Fundación Paraguaya offers a combination of conventional schooling 50% of the time and 50% of the time focussed on agriculture, producing young graduates who have ability and excitement about being able to make a viable living out of the land.”

We have been particularly disturbed to hear about the high levels of graduate unemployment in developing countries. Our report on Sierra Leone and Liberia highlighted the 70% graduate unemployment rate in Sierra Leone, for which we never discovered a satisfactory explanation. In addition, we were told that the graduates all wanted employment with the government but that these jobs were already all filled with people who were often of poor quality and ineffective but impossible to remove.

When we spoke to university students in Dodoma on our Tanzania visit they told us that they did not feel that their university courses were preparing them for life in the working world. They were interested in the idea of sandwich courses where they could spend a year out in industry applying their studies.

Conclusions and recommendations • We recommend that DFID more explicitly target youth unemployment.

• Currently, donors, the private sector and developing country governments are not working together on a scale to even approach meeting the challenge. The work needs to be scaled up and a sense of urgency injected into the thinking and planning.

• The majority of young people entering the labour market in developing countries will be self-employed or in informal employment. DFID needs to ensure that education in schools teaches the skills young people will need to enter a world of work in which the majority will be self- employed.

• We recommend that DFID officials meet with BIS officials to discuss which of the BIS youth programmes could be transferred to developing countries.

• To ensure it gives greater priority to youth unemployment, we recommend DFID creates the position of a senior adviser on youth employment.

• We encourage DFID to work with organisations proven experience in youth job creation, such as Peace Child International and Youth Business International, to create and pilot innovative ways of collecting and measuring youth job creation data.

• Jobs and livelihoods are such an important issue we recommend that our successor Committee takes it up in the next Parliament to assess what progress has been made.

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INTEGRATION A NEW DIRECTION FOR YOUTH EMPLOYMENT PROGRAMS by

Michal Rutkowski Senior Director and Head of Global Practice for Social Protection and Jobs at the World Bank That nearly half of the world’s young people are jobless is daunting. Worse still, what’s being done to tackle the problem isn’t working. A recent study found that only a third of over 100 youth employment programmes had a clear positive impact on employment outcomes and earnings – and even those with positive outcomes had limited impact. These programmes aim to increase employability, but have seldom led to higher employment. The large numbers of youth entering the market will need 600 million more jobs over the next 15 years. Simply more jobs won’t do either. One in four young people today can’t find work for more than $1.25 per day, and women lag behind men. Not only must new jobs be high-quality, they need to be more inclusive too.

Overcoming this complex challenge requires a multifaceted and integrative approach - one that intervenes on the labour supply side, to help increase the employability of job-seekers, and focuses on the labour demand side, to help firms create more jobs. Such an approach is presented in the new integrated framework by

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Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE). The coalition’s cutting-edge work has produced a fresh perspective on developing a second generation of integrated youth employment programs: this new integrated framework now needs to be piloted, tested, and measured.

The aim of these integrated programmes is to combine supply and demand side interventions simultaneously to address three interrelated objectives: • To help prepare young job-seekers for jobs or move to better jobs; • To improve the quality of jobs young people already hold, many of which are in the informal sector; - and • To promote the creation of youth-relevant jobs.

To increase employability, youth employment programmes need systems that help gather data about the constraints beneficiaries face, and cater to those specific needs.

Programme designers should identify the right target population, clearly define socioeconomic or demographic groups, and profile the selected beneficiaries to grasp the intensity and diversity of the constraints each one faces. Integrated packages of services should then be developed based on these specific constraints. These integrated packages should be delivered using performance-based contracts with incentives for placing youth in jobs, including a premium on placing especially hard-to-place youth.

Robust supply side interventions should be used with equally strong interventions on the demand side to boost youth-relevant jobs. Firstly, a profile of possible jobs should be formed to match the target youth population. The requirements of the target group of enterprises should be defined and supported in order of priority. The constraints to growth these enterprises face, as well as the barriers to entry for new enterprises, should be identified. Taking these requirements and constraints into consideration, a package of support services can be designed and implemented - once again with performance-based contracts wherever possible.

Carefully customised supply and demand interventions should then be appropriately connected. Linking the two is crucial to maximizing their unique synergies from the project identification phase all the way through implementation.

Effective integration also relies on specific elements of design. These include formulating an objective that outlines a common end goal, setting up a countryspecific fund particularly for targeted firms (the demand side intervention) to hire or provide internships to targeted youth (the supply side intervention), designing mutually reinforcing activities and integration-supporting incentives for youth or enterprise beneficiaries.

S4YE’s new integrated framework is by no means exhaustive, but it provides tools which continue to evolve to incorporate new knowledge and adapt to new situations.

Upon testing, the framework aims to help youth employment programmes address, comprehensively, the specific needs and constraints of young job seekers and firms alike, thereby strengthening their impact. The coalition’s vision of a world where all young people are engaged in productive work remains daunting, but its learnings are making its mission’s path clearer every day.

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The International Labour Organisation (ILO) leads on labour issues and employment policy within the UN System.

ILO manages the UN Global Initiative for Decent Jobs for Youth – a comprehensive UN system-wide effort to deliver on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It focuses on locally owned interventions, clustered around eight thematic priorities:

Every two years, the ILO produces the Global Employment Trends for Youth (GET Youth) – the essential work of reference for all working within this field.

A summary of the main findings of the most recent (2017) report follows - 61 -

GET Youth 2017 main findings

[The orange line = the total number of youth unemployed; the columns = the % rate of youth unemployed]

Global and regional trends for youth employment • Globally, 70.9 million young people are estimated to be unemployed in 2017 and the global youth unemployment rate is 13.1% - little changed in the last three years.

This is officially registered unemployed youth: it does not include the millions who are in education, sitting at home, or not looking for work.

• In developing countries, the unemployment rate among youth is expected to remain stable at 9.5%, while in emerging countries it is expected to rise to 13.8%. In developed countries it is expected to decline from 14.0% in 2016 to 13.4%.

• Across OECD countries, almost 18% of unemployed youth have been without work for a year or longer.

• Youth are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. Globally, the ratio of youth to adult unemployment rates has changed very little in recent years, which illustrates the persistently disadvantaged state of young people in labour markets.

•

Between 1997 and 2017, the youth population grew by 139 million people, while

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•

• • • •

• • • • •

the youth labour force shrank by 34.9 million people. The proportion of youth in the overall global labour force declined from 21.7% to 15.5%.

The youth labour force participation rate (LFPR = the percentage of youth who are engaged in the labour market, either by working or looking for work) has declined in the past 20 years from 55.0% to 45.7%. As the chart shows, only amongst elder women (25+) has the LFPR increased: amongst young women, it is dropping everywhere except Sub-Saharan Africa.

Globally, three out of four employed young women and men are in informal employment, compared to three in five for adults. In developing countries, this ratio is as high as 19 out of 20 for young women and men.

An estimated 21.8% of young people are neither in employment nor in education or training (NEET). Female NEET rates are much higher: globally, the female NEET rate is 34.4%, compared to 9.8% for males.

Young women comprise three out of every four young NEETs, and the disparity is greatest in emerging countries where four out of five young NEETs are female. In Southern Asia, in particular, nine out of ten young NEETs are women.

Regionally, male NEET rates are lowest in Eastern Asia at 3.7%, followed by South Asia at 5.8%. Rates are highest in Northern Africa at 16.7%, followed by Central and Western Asia at 14.8%.

The latest data shows that 76.7% of working youth are in informal jobs, compared with 57.9% of working adults.

Youth in the informal sector as a percentage of employed youth is 96.8% in developing countries, 83.0% in emerging countries, and slightly less than 20% in developed countries.

Globally, it is estimated that 21.8% of youth are NEET, 76.9% of which are female.

In 2017, 16.7% of working youth in emerging and developing countries live below the extreme poverty threshold of US$1.90 per day.

Young people form the bulk of international migrants – around 70% are younger than 30.

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• • •

The global population is ageing. In 2015, youth aged 15–24 made up 16.2% of the total population, while adults aged 65 or older amounted to 8.3%.

By 2030, the share of youth will fall slightly, to 15.2%, while the share of people aged 65 or older will rise to almost 12%.

By 2050, the older population is projected to outnumber young persons, and this implies that the active workforce must sustain the pension and health-care schemes for a growing number of retired workers.

Measuring transitions: pathways to decent work • In developing countries, young persons are more likely to settle definitively into self-employment.

• For all levels of education, transitions into employment tend to be longer in emerging countries than in developing countries.

• Combining work with study substantially shortens the transition period in all regions.

• The longer a young person studies, the shorter the transition time into employment.

Future of work for youth: Technology and sectoral shifts • Compared to older workers, young workers are more comfortable with new technologies and likely to adapt faster.

• The sectors identified as an expanding source of youth employment are: financial services; human health and social work activities; trade, hotels and restaurants.

Meanwhile, transport, storage, information and communications (ICT) are absorbing young workers across the globe.

• Manufacturing employment has declined in most regions, but remains important, especially in Asia and the Pacific, and particularly for young workers.

• Overall, constant innovation will require a strong need for core work skills such as complex problem-solving, openness to learning and adaptability, across all education levels.

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New forms of youth employment • Young people are twice as likely as adults to be in temporary employment.

• New forms of work like crowd-working and the gig economy present opportunities because of their flexibility, but also dangers because of the lack of regulation.

• Young people value job security and expect to achieve it in the future.

• On average, young workers are now better educated than previous generations. In addition, they have grown up in an environment more open to technology and thus have a comparative advantage in computer use compared to older workers.

• In high-income countries, one in three young workers does not have a contract of employment. In upper middle-income countries, it is one in two, and in low and lower middle-income countries, three out of four young workers have no contract.

Policies for a better future of youth employment The ILO’s Call for Action, which sets out a strategy for holistic, multi-pronged action to address the youth employment challenge, has been reiterated recently at a series of national consultations held to discuss the Future of Work.

• Many young people combine work and study. From 2012–16, on average, a quarter of those still in school are working or had worked at some point. In all regions, the transition to work was shortest for young people who combined work with study.

• ILO’s School-to-Work Transition Surveys in 34 countries found that the average time for the full transition to a stable and satisfactory job was 13.8 months – 14.4 months for females and 13.7 months for males. Young people living in rural areas had a longer transition: 15.4 months, compared to 13.3 months for their urban counterparts.

• Trends from the last decade suggest prominent growth sectors for young workers include: financial services; trade, hotels, and restaurants; transport and storage, information and communications; and health services (including care work and social work activities).

• The percentage share of young workers in financial services has grown in Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe, Central and Western Asia + Latin America and the Caribbean while it has declined in Northern, Western and Southern Europe and North America.

• Globally, there has been growth in the trade, hotel and restaurant sector, in transport and storage, + information and communication, as well as in the health services sector.

• In the developing regions of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, employment in agriculture is declining for both young and older workers, though a sizable number of young workers remain in agriculture.

• Manufacturing employment, though it has declined in most regions in recent years, remains a significant employer – accounting for roughly 10% of employment in Africa, 20% in Eastern Europe, Central and Western Asia, and approximately 17 percent in Asia and the Pacific.

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• • • • • • •

• •

Trends from the last decade point towards an increase in the share of high-skilled workers and a decline in the share of semi-skilled workers.

Macro-economic policies, complemented by sectoral policies, will play an important role in supporting this, particularly as technology affects demand for labour.

Expansionary fiscal policy and sectoral development policies can be combined with Active Labour Market Programmes to establish a coherent overall strategy to facilitate the transition of young people to decent work.

Skills development systems will need to adapt to changing demands for skills. But it will also provide opportunities, such as the expansion of training to disadvantaged groups.

Governments, firms and workers’ organizations need to collaborate on identifying and developing relevant skills. Youth voices and aspirations must also be taken into consideration.

New technology can be used to increase young people’s access to finance, as well as encourage green jobs and platform-based cooperatives that promote entrepreneurship.

Labour market institutions and information systems must adapt to rapid changes and take advantage of technological innovation. This will help to improve profiling of young people in youth employment programmes, expand programme delivery and promote better coordination and monitoring for improved labour market governance.

New and diverse employment forms must be reflected in new and updated mechanisms for ensuring young workers’ rights. Active participation of the social partners will be crucial.

Global alliances such as the Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth, launched in 2016, are critical for scaling up action and impact to advance the SDGs. For the Full Report, see: http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/globalemployment-trends/WCMS_598669/lang--en/index.htm.

ÓÎ ÏÒ

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GLOBAL

OPPORTUNITY YOUTH

- a project of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions by Jamie McAuliffe, This is a precis of a global youth employment landscape report to be published by The Aspen Institute later in 2018. For more information, please contact Jamie McAuliffe (Senior Fellow, The Aspen Institute): djmcauliffejr@gmail.com

The Aspen Institute defines “Opportunity Youth” as young people who are out-ofschool or out- of-work but who have great potential to achieve meaningful economic opportunity if provided the right support. A new global project seeks to create an integrated, systems approach to generating jobs and livelihoods for such youth in specific towns and cities, in collaboration with local government, educators and business stakeholders. This initial paper summarizes the project goals and strategies, identifies some of the themes and findings that are informing the initiative design, and gives a fascinating listing of the different donors, NGOs, private sector partners and others active in this space.

The concept is driven by the need for greater donor collaboration and diversification of funding mechanisms. It stresses the importance of youth voice and leadership and the need for links to a broader campaign for opportunity youth globally, potentially anchored in a Global Opportunity Youth Summit. The “North Star” youth outcome and impact goals are anchored in the 2030 UN Sustainable Development goals.

Project Design Framework The Aspen Institute, supported by The Prudential Foundation and in collaboration with other global partners, aims to implement a systems approach which will start with an in-depth market analysis of youth economic opportunity from education to employment /livelihoods at the urban or peri-urban level. The starter framework is place-based and context-specific, collaborative in design and implementation, and uses a systems lens to understand the jobs and livelihoods eco-system opportunities most ripe for change.

• A Global Learning Community: Collaborative partnerships are on 2 levels: 1) at the local level to implement interventions for youth; 2) at the global level to share good practice, mobilize resources / investment, and recruit transnational partners, particularly in the private sector. Government champions may be necessary to spur commitments to action + connections to a global community of practice to leverage cross-community learning and network opportunities.

• Youth Voice & Leadership at the Center – is key: “Nothing about us Without us” • Digital Opportunities & Future of Work: the project will identify opportunities to expand access to the best models, build knowledge about the more effective skilling, market-matching and other technology platforms while identifying gaps to be filled by new models or adapting existing models.

• A focus on proven solutions and a commitment to ongoing data tracking and

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evaluation: Experts agree that more research is needed to unpack the specific elements of interventions that lead to positive outcomes, conducted over longer time-frames, with better assessments of the cost-effectiveness of different interventions as well as the potential for displacement effects (- where a new employee just replaces an existing one.)

Proposed Structural Elements Based on Landscape Research Findings • Collaboration between funders: this enables “big bet” opportunities at scale; • Build on existing initiatives: though many platforms exist, there needs to be better coordination, integration and advocacy for proven solutions.

• A convening strategy to engender more collaboration among practitioners: Bring together opportunity youth + the organizations dedicated to supporting them from both developed countries and emerging markets. YouthBuild International, for one, has called for a Global Opportunity Youth Summit to galvanize new partnerships, commitments, and a sustained campaign dedicated to opportunity youth. A convening strategy would achieve three things: 1) launch a global community of practice to advance knowledge and practice; 2) have youth leadership at its core - and 3) galvanize business and other institutional commitments to youth economic opportunity linked to the 2030 SDG goals.

• Global operational structure: a lean global team will manage the funding, build the local partnerships and convene the community of practice. The knowledge and evaluation agenda, the impact investments and the youth leadership / global summits will be managed by existing global specialist institutions.

• Skills matching: While supply-side approaches continue to predominate, more actors are taking up the call to better connect education to jobs to address the paradox of large numbers of youth remaining un- or under-employed while millions of jobs go unfilled.

• Hiring opportunity youth: a smart investment: In many markets, including tight labour markets like the U.S., private companies need to be persuaded to look beyond their traditional talent pools and hire more ‘Opportunity Youth’ who often stay longer and are more loyal than the typical hire.

• Promote apprenticeships: Important to change mindsets in those parts of the world where apprenticeships are viewed as a poor alternative to traditional postsecondary schooling.

• Entrepreneurship: evidence from the World Bank suggests that entrepreneurship programmes in some low-income countries have short-term employment effects (Kluve et al. 2017). But most have not tracked participants long enough to establish whether their businesses survive, let alone thrive and grow.

• Importance of youth disaggregation & youth agency: Engaging youth in programme design and regular feedback is increasingly valued as a practice that both ensures youth agency in their own future and helps inform and improve programme design.

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G A P S??

• Scale: We must prove the business case to employers to unlock higher levels of employer (… and government) contributions.

• Lack of funding: ODAs have Request for Proposals(RFPs) that are complex and unrealistic; global-minded companies and funders need partners with the demonstrated capacity and platforms to deliver at scale across multiple geographies. IYF and Youthbuild Intl. have such capacity but few others exist.

• More research needed: The ILO’s What Works in Youth Development site provides a very useful map of the existing evidence gaps. But more long-term impact assessment is needed to assess displacement and to discover how – if? – control groups catch up with the beneficiary groups.

• Jobs are changing: The impact of digital technologies and their job creation potential are not well understood in the developing world. Accenture, Google and the Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative are among those addressing this knowledge gap; • Shared learning needed between developed and developing country experience: for example, several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have launched national youth service programmesthat could benefit from dialogue and learning with their North American counterparts. Similarly, developing country experience in fostering youth entrepreneurship has lessons for developed markets.

• Lack of Metrics: Youth training programmeslack consistent metrics that allow cross-organizational comparison and cost-benefit analysis. This is a promising area on which government and NGOs might collaborate. McKinsey’s Generation Initiative proposes a “cost per employed day” or CPED (Jaffar and Mourshed 2017) to capture training costs vs. number of days employed in first 6 months of work.

• Migration: Many are discussing this issue but few have launched concerted efforts to address the economic needs of migrant and refugee populations.

WHO’S DOING WHAT? Study of the Landscape of the Youth Employment Field The following funders have made youth livelihoods a strategic pillar of their work and make important contributions to address global youth unemployment • • • • • • • • •

• •

Mastercard Foundation Ford Foundation Rockefeller Foundation JP Morgan Chase Prudential Citi Foundation Google Fossil Foundation Salesforce

• • • • • •

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Adecco Michael and Susan Dell Foundation Accenture Nestle Unilever Manpower Group Hilton Hotels MISK Grand Challenge

The following multi-stakeholder coalitions do similar work: • S4YE • UN Global Init. for Decent Jobs • Co-Impact • Making Cents • GCYE / RTI • Youth Employment Funders • X Prize Power Skills Contest Group: Mastercard, USAID etc • Alliance for Intl Youth Development: IYF etc.

• Joint Youth Employment • New Employment Opportunities (NEO) Initiative for Africa • MIT Solve Competition— Youth, Skills and the Workforce of the Future The following funders, governments, platforms & practitioner groups are testing new approaches to provide pathways from education to employment for unemployed youth.

• Aspiring minds • Andela • Action Emploi Refugees • Bayes Impact • General Assembly • Lynk • Samasource • Digital Divide Data • Moringa School – Kenya • Fuzu • Laboratoria • I-merit.net • Accenture’s Skills to Succeed Academy • Babajobs – India Practitioners include: Employer-led Coalitions like: • Movement to Work • Juntos Para L’empleo • Global Impact Sourcing Coalition • Africa Working • HireUp • Collectif pour L’Emploi Government Policy Initiatives like: • National Youth Service - Kenya • Flexicurity - Denmark • Universal Basic Income (UBI) – Finland • Skills Future – Singapore • EU Commission Youth Guarantee Scheme • EU Youth Apprenticeship Plan • South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme NGO specialists like: • Year Up • Maharashi Institute Impact Sourcing Academy • African Management Institute • Youth for Technology Foundation • WAVE (West Africa Vocational Education) • Junior Achievement • Association of Volunteers in Intl. Service • Service—WINGS Programme • McKinsey’s Generation Initiative • Peace Child International • Hand in Hand International • Traidcraft • World Vision • Care International

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Creative Associates IL&FS Skills YouthBuild International Educate – Uganda Youth Business International Akazi Kanoze Education For Employment Harambee International Youth Foundation Prince’s Trust Plan International Save the Children Catholic Relief Services Y-Care

THE CASE FOR URGENT ACTION ON YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

WHAT WORKS

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Young Africa Works Mastercard Foundation’s Strategy to Promote and Expand Employment Opportunities for Young People in Africa by Reeta Roy, CEO, Mastercard Foundation

This team of u-learn participants are learning to build a hostel under the mentorship of Patrick Frank Miiro of Miiro Electric Services and Civil Engineering in Jinja, Uganda. They are trained in cement mixing, bricking, slabbing, mortaring, and electrical installation.

Africa’s Youth Employment Challenge Africa is the youngest and fastest growing continent in the world. By 2030, there will be 375 million young people in the job market in Africa. Within a few decades, this demographic boom will push Africa’s workforce to more than a billion people, the largest in the world.

While economic growth in many countries has been strong over the last 10 years, it has come with relatively few employment opportunities. According to the International Labour Organization, almost 80 percent of people in Africa work informally. Recent research undertaken by our Foundation in two countries in Africa found that amongst young people, very few had access to formal employment and most struggled to make a decent salary to live. When young people can secure formal work and a steady wage their lives improve. Employment, particularly formal employment, is a leading

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pathway out of poverty for families. In Africa, the world’s youngest continent, youth employment is a particularly important measure of poverty reduction.

This generation is healthier and better educated than their parents. Through technology, they have easier access to information, and consumer goods and services.

The world they live in is more democratic. While the circumstances of their lives are measurably better than they were in the past, a significant gap between the number of young people seeking work and the limited employment opportunities available to them means that they will face challenges finding formal employment, and a pathway out of poverty. Moreover, for some time we’ve observed a mismatch between the skills of young people entering the workforce and the needs of employers.

The youth employment challenge is daunting, but it is not insurmountable.

The Mastercard Foundation Response We see the challenge of youth employment in Africa as an immense opportunity.

Africa’s young people are innovative and energetic, and they are already creating solutions to the challenges they face. The time is right for the Foundation to focus on supporting them by driving systematic change in financial inclusion and education to increase youth employment and reduce poverty.

That is why our goal is, by 2030, to enable 30 million young people, particularly women, to secure employment that they see as dignified and fulfilling.

This goal is part of our new Young Africa Works strategy. To achieve it, we will: - Design country-specific strategies: Improving education and vocational training. Finding new ways to connect people with opportunity, and increasing financial inclusion are all a part of the solution to the youth employment challenge. In addition, our approach will reflect the unique challenges and opportunities of the countries in which we work.

- Empower young women: Young women face additional, gender-based barriers in skills development and in accessing work. Breaking down these barriers is essential to their success, and ours.

- Work with more African organizations: On-the-ground knowledge and expertise is the bedrock of the Foundation’s work. Partnering with African-led organizations active in seeking solutions to youth employment is a priority.

- Use technology to drive impact and scale: Technology has the power to connect young people to their first job, apprenticeships, and cooperative programs. It also enables faster, more efficient access to capital, talent, and business support for entrepreneurs. It drives growth, inclusion, and poverty reduction.

- Share more evidence-based knowledge and innovation: In a rapidly changing work environment, data-driven, creative solutions are needed. We will find new insights and share them with others to magnify our impact.

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The Young Africa Works strategy is a continuation of our decade-old collaboration with Africa’s youth. Their voices and insights have guided us as we have developed this strategy. Through them, we have learned that: - Young people want to drive change. They want to be more than just beneficiaries of programs; this generation wants to be job creators. Their input is critical in the development of programs, policies, and decisions that affect youth employment.

- They have a vision for a more inclusive future. Over and over, young people have told us to be bold in our goals. Young women, rural youth, and refugees face additional barriers in gaining employment. The Foundation will do more to break down walls of inequality and empower the most vulnerable young people to succeed.

- They believe in the power of innovation and technology. Young people not only want to be equipped with the skills they need to leverage current technology, they want to lead in the development of the technology of tomorrow. To that end, we will bolster support to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education as we move forward.

-

In light of the scale and complexity of Africa’s youth employment challenge, no one organization can address it alone. We must programme holistically and work with African governments, private sector, educators, and other funders. More cooperation with the formal private sector will be needed as well as increased levels of financial inclusion. The modernization of the agricultural sector and other critical growth sectors is key. Supporting African institutions to advance change in individual countries will be essential, as will advancing global discussions on youth employment in Africa.

About the Mastercard Foundation The Mastercard Foundation seeks a world where everyone has the opportunity to learn and prosper. The Foundation’s work is guided by its mission to advance learning and promote financial inclusion for people living in poverty. One of the largest foundations in the world, it works almost exclusively in Africa. It was created in 2006

by Mastercard International and operates independently under the governance of its own Board of Directors. The Foundation is based in Toronto, Canada. For more information and to sign up for the Foundation’s newsletter, please visit www.mastercardfdn.org Follow the Foundation at @MastercardFdn on Twitter.

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THE VALUE OF LIFE SKILLS FOR BUSINESSES & YOUTH EMPLOYMENT by William S. Reese, CEO, International Youth Foundation (IYF) Can you think of an employer or industry that would want to hire someone who doesn’t work well in teams, isn’t responsible, and can’t creatively problem-solve?

Whether you use the term life skills, social-emotional learning, soft skills, or noncognitive skills, everyone needs to be equipped with these competencies to succeed on the job and in life. However, while millions of young people want to work and long to contribute, employers struggle to find candidates with the non-technical skills they require. An investment in life skills aligns youth and employer needs, translating to business value and progress on youth employment.

Labour and workforce gurus today speak often of a skills mismatch, specifically those tied to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). True, but another, more subtle gap, in life skills, persists. Companies increasingly have made it clear they want to fill positions with people equipped with these competencies. In a Wall Street Journal survey, 90 percent of employers said “soft skills” were as or more important than technical skills, but 89 percent said they had a hard time finding candidates with the right mix. The International Youth Foundation (IYF) created its Passport to Success® life skills training and curriculum to prepare young people to fulfil their potential as confident, responsible team players who can succeed in creating their own opportunities or in the workforce.

In over a decade of adapting and refining PTS in 40-plus countries and more than 20 languages, IYF has seen the value of life skills across industries and countries. “I realized how much I learned about dealing with clients’ needs, teamwork, and coming in on time,” says Sathia, a young woman from St. Lucia who trained in life skills as part of IYF’s regional Caribbean Youth Empowerment Program (CYEP) in partnership with USAID. Globally, IYF has seen life skills training reduce drop-out rates, help young people find their voice and identify their goals, and improve work readiness.

“PTS teaches us how to live, to enter the world of employability, to prep for a job interview, and to write a curriculum vitae,” says Helena, a student in IYF’s Escholhas initiative in partnership with Mozal in Mozambique. “We become different not only at school, but at home too. PTS is transformation.”

Life skills training has played an integral role in IYF’s co-designed initiatives and partnerships with leading global companies as diverse as Caterpillar, Cummins, Chevron, PepsiCo, and Hilton. In such instances, life skills training has been applied in a workshop floor setting with heavy machinery; in complement to hands-on STEM training; and in a hospitality setting. A Hilton survey shows that 80 percent of participants in PTS training had better communication, teamwork, and conflict management skills and more respect and confidence.

So, are life skills measurable? IYF’s answer is a clear yes, and with scientific rigor.

IYF has partnered with testing company ACT to create an assessment of work readiness using the latest in non-cognitive testing. Slated to be available in late 2018, it

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will be a unique resource for employers, schools, training institutions, youth-serving organizations, and young people themselves. The assessment will measure the impact of soft skills training programs—not just IYF’s PTS curriculum.

This learning and measurement become even more critical when considered in the context of the future of work— these days a frequent topic of debate, worry, and sometimes dire predictions. While we cannot know exactly what lies ahead, research indicates that the hardest skills for employers to find are those that can’t be performed by machines. Cited among these is creativity, which matters as a life skill for the way it allows us to navigate the shifts inherent in our modern world with flexibility, persistence, and empathy. All life skills are complementary and inter-dependent.

Creativity in particular is closely tied to complex problem-solving—cited in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report as the most important skill needed to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution. Much also is written today about the resilience of societies and communities. For a young person wanting to enter the workplace and then be relevant for the next 50 years, grit and resilience will be essential.

In the context of this period in time’s rapid change and unpredictability, life skills’ relevance and transferability across industries carries particular value. Although the consequences differ, good communication matters whether you are using heavy machinery or coordinating with co-workers behind a reception desk. Someone pursuing a career in STEM needs the same self-confidence to persist despite obstacles that anyone in an office setting or self-employment track requires for success.

Thumeka Khetye from South Africa learned, through IYF’s Passport to Success® (PTS) training, the ability to establish goals and communicate well. This set her apart, her supervisor says. IYF enabled the College of Cape Town, where Thumeka studied, to integrate PTS into its technical courses with support from Irish Aid and the Caterpillar Foundation, Caterpillar’s philanthropic organization.

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Consider 21-year-old Thumeka in South Africa, whose life skills training sets her apart. She has completed PTS training and is pursuing a career in the male-dominated automotive industry. “She communicates well and displays a mature work ethic,” her supervisor says. “Thumeka is also able to set goals and prioritize very effectively.

Those are the employees you are looking for in a business today. They’re very rare.”

In Kenya’s growing construction industry, life skills training again pays benefits for employers. “In most cases, you get an experienced mason with very good technical skills but a very bad attitude,” explains one site manager. He hired four graduates of the Sport for Kenyan Youth Employment initiative, led by IYF in partnership with Barclays Bank. He praises their hard work, leadership, and safety compliance and plans to employ them on his next project.

When formal sector hiring is not a reliable way to earn an income, life skills training prepares young people to navigate uncertainty and succeed in creating their own livelihoods and opportunities. In partnership with DFID, USAID, and the Embassy of Sweden, IYF’s Zimbabwe:Works (Z:W) initiative trained nearly 29,000 young people, 61 percent of whom were women, in life skills, financial literacy, and business development. To achieve these results, Z:W engaged local organizations and 745 private sector partners. Of youth who trained in life skills and completed Z:Worganized internships, 80 percent were placed in full-time employment.

Developing young people’s life skills also serves business needs beyond the entrylevel employee. With time and experience, a 20-year-old with life skills will be even better equipped at 30 and 40. Research shows that these skills, including being able to resolve conflict or work independently and collaboratively, become increasingly valuable as a young person progresses in her career. Employers also can see a return on investment from life skills training in terms of retention, performance, and professional advancement. According to the Hilton survey, after six months 96 percent of people trained in PTS were still with Hilton, and 40 percent had been promoted.

Having previously created PTS for Hospitality online in partnership with Hilton, IYF seeks to use technology to allow greater numbers of young people to achieve their full potential by creating a multi-sector online version of PTS. We want to hear more stories like that of Mithun, a participant in an IYF initiative in India, who attributes his current position at a local technology company to his life skills training. “This is how I got the job: discipline, punctuality, working in a team, working hard,” he says.

In 2030, the timeframe for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), today’s teenagers will be in their 30s. To eradicate extreme poverty and achieve SDG 8.5—full and productive employment for all, including youth— the world needs to create opportunities for 1 billion young people to enter the workforce. As the anecdotes shared here collectively demonstrate, equipping young people with indemand life skills prepares them on the pathway to a job or first livelihood, and then a lifetime of work. Life skills can take a young man or woman to 2040, 2050, and 2060.

Making this progress on the skills gap and youth unemployment and underemployment requires a concerted cross-sectoral effort. Working together—the public sector, training and apprenticeships programs, private business, philanthropies, and foreign aid agencies—we can ensure more young people reach their full potential.

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Approaches to Mentorship by

Jonathan Pfahl, Founder & CEO, Rockstar Mentors Mentorship is central to successful start-ups and therefore to youth job creation.

Mentorship is different from consultant support because mentors provide the pastoral and personal support essential for young entrepreneurs. The Prince’s Trust (PT) pioneered the concept of mentorship in the UK. To date, PT has helped 400,000 mostly disadvantaged young people to start successful businesses. The great majority of them have grown and now provide thousands of jobs and significant tax revenue to government. Youth Business International (YBI) has franchised the model to 50 countries with similar success, convincing many policy-makers to see the wisdom of investing in mentored start-ups.

An early PT study found that, with caring mentors, 4 out of 5 companies were still in business and generating profit after 3 years. Without mentors, that figure fell to one in five. In some YBI countries, banks accept that the provision of a YBI or PT trained mentor is as good, if not better, than physical collateral for a business start-up loan.

PT and YBI recruit and train effective volunteer mentors. My organization, the Rockstar Group, by contrast, believes that paying mentors results in a more serious commitment from both mentors and their mentees: the young start-up manager. The cost of mentorship is generally not very high compared to the total cost of starting a small business. For most, it is clearly worth investing a thousand or two to have at your elbow someone who has started a similar business and made a success of it.

My own experience confirms this: when I arrived in London from Australia in 2005, I wanted to get my head around my new job at Goldman Sachs quickly. So – I paid a senior staff member to mentor me – and it worked. So, when I moved into the property business a few years later, I did the same – spending £3,000 to get a multimillionaire property magnate to mentor me. Again – it worked: I was able to buy 6 houses in my first year.

I firmly believe that the fastest way to succeed in business is to find someone who has already done what you want to do, and get them to show you, one-to-one, how they did it. That’s why I started Rockstar Mentors: I wanted to give entrepreneurs the same benefits that I’d received from having a top mentor by my side to guide me through the business world, open doors for me and help me build my wealth.

I recruited a group of highly successful entrepreneurs, each of whom had created and sold a company for in excess of £5 million and launched a one-stop shop where a young entrepreneur could choose the mentor with the achievements he or she most wanted to emulate.

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Fast-forward to today, and Rockstar has now helped start or grow over 8,500 businesses in pretty much every sector you can imagine. 70% of them have survived and are prospering. We now have our own Hubs in Central London, where we run our mentoring sessions and events. We also have our in-house legal team and an investment platform which helps find the funds for “Rockstar Businesses.”

The Rockstar mentoring platform is designed to help a business achieve precise financial goals over a set period of time. We offer each young person an initial free consultation to specify the sector they are in and the particular challenges their business will face + the financial goals they wish to achieve in their first 6 – 12 months of operation. Armed with that information, we help them plan the best way forward for their business and introduce them to the best mentor(s) to guide and help them achieve those goals through their contacts, professional experience and support.

We have some of the UK’s (and the world’s) most well-known and respected entrepreneurs as our mentors and we structure all of our mentoring around achieving tangible financial results for our clients. We also have an App on which our mentors give mentees free advice on how to succeed in their industry and their area of expertise. So a young start-up manager can harvest some of the best advice in the world for free – and then, if s/he wants one-on-one mentorship, they can hire the most appropriate mentor for them for a face-to-face meeting or a skype call.

I know how lucky I have been in my mentors – and I work to achieve that luck for each Rockstar mentee. But I firmly share Richard Branson’s sense that business is all about “having fun, making a lot of money, and doing good….” And I have worked to do good through my business – helping the UK government’s Start-up initiative through its early years, and supporting promising business ventures that provide essential services for Low Income Countries. One of these is the Simple Drinking Water initiative – which offers the potential to bring clean drinking water to millions of people in remote areas. Clean water is so essential to life, good health and nutrition – it’s no wonder that even the poorest people in the world are prepared to pay for it. So creating a business opportunity out of saving lives, and enriching communities is the most satisfying work that anyone can find.

And – in Rockstar Mentors – I get the same satisfaction. I have never been unemployed – and I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have skills, ideas and abundant energy to do something – and have doors to such opportunities persistently slammed in my face. A good entrepreneur will always find some way of creating a business in almost any situation – and a good mentor will help that business be successful.

Yes – there is a need for urgent action to solve the youth unemployment crisis. And good mentorship should be high on that menu of urgent actions that governments and policy-makers offer to their young people. I know that it makes the difference between success and failure for them – and for your country.

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School Enterprise Programme by Nik Kafka and Martin Burt, Teach a Man to Fish & Fundacion Paraguaya “When you see one baby floating down a river, jump in and rescue it. When you see baby after baby floating down the river, go upstream, find the person throwing babies into the river, and stop them!” Parable of the River Meet Mary Mary is not a typical eighteen-year-old school leaver in Uganda. She is overwhelmed with choices: she has the well-founded confidence which comes from knowing that not only has she done well in her exams, but that she has developed a range of the essential skills she needs for success in work and life.

She’s a great team-player, but is able lead when required proactively to solve problems. She can express her views clearly and understands that listening is just as important. She understands business – having had two years’ experience of finance, sales, management and production.

All of which make her choices harder: should she set-up her own business because she has all the experience to do so? Or should she take a decent job because employers are always saying that they need young people with just her kind of skills? Or should she continue in education so that even more possibilities open up for her – running a business or taking part-time work on the side to cover the costs of this?

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She won’t have to get married to have someone else support her. She won’t have to hope that there is a youth employment programme she can enter that will solve her problems. She is empowered.

How to make Mary the rule, not the exception This is the story we would all like to hear, but sadly it is not a ‘typical’ story. It is a story so rare that it catches our attention. It is a story that should be the norm, instead of the exception. But it’s not. Why is this, and what’s the solution?

Youth unemployment is at record levels globally. Every year, more young people across the world leave education looking for decent work to support themselves and their families, yet find none. Piecemeal job creation initiatives and short-term work readiness initiatives will never be able to plug this hole and provide opportunities on the scale required. We cannot fish each unemployed and unemployable young person out of the river one by one. We need to go upstream to find the source of the problem - and grasp the solution that lies in waiting.

The primary and secondary education system in most countries was never set up to produce stories like Mary’s. The only measure of success has been in academic exams.

As such, schools have endeavoured to deliver ever better exam results while quietly ignoring how ill-prepared these leave graduates as they try to enter the workforce.

But if we want more young people facing such exciting ‘tough choices’ of employment, entrepreneurship or higher education, we need an education system that offers more than a purely academic experience.

School Enterprise For the last fifteen years Teach A Man To Fish and Fundación Paraguaya have been refining sustainable, scalable approaches for creating the next generation of Marys. Through a desire to a create financially self-sufficient school model, we stumbled across one of the most powerful educational platforms for equipping young people with the skills needed for success in work and life - the School Enterprise.

A School Enterprise is a profit-making business set up at a school which provides an experiential learning opportunity for students to develop a diverse range of business, workplace and life-skills needed for success beyond school.

This might range from a chicken coop in a rural area to a bakery in a city, from a plant producing recycled paper to a brass band for events. The only limit is students’ imagination, market demand, and the quality and price of their product.

Key Features of the Programme While this may sound familiar at first sight, there are however critical differences in the approach to more conventional ‘enterprise education’ programmes.

In the first place, these are planned as real long-term businesses, selling real products to real customers and capable of growth over time. A share of the profits is reinvested into the business to fund growth in the following year, ensuring the longterm financial sustainability of the programme at the school level.

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Secondly, part of the profits from the business are set aside to support the school’s educational priorities – often funding places for underprivileged students, scholastic materials, school facilities etc. – or for social work in the community.

Thirdly, it upskills teachers, exposing them and their learners to new pedagogies.

Teachers are trained to act as business mentors and group facilitators. However students are put directly in charge of planning and implementing the business, offering them a rare chance to take the lead. This is one of the reasons it leads to such powerful learning outcomes: it provides a totally new experience for students used to traditional teacher-centred classrooms.

Does it Work?

In 2017, more than 82,500 young people directly took part in such programmesfrom Paraguay to Rwanda, Nicaragua to Uganda, South Africa to India.

But does it work?

• Empowering students to be self-reliant: An overwhelming 87% of students reported that they felt confident enough to plan and set up their own business.

• Extra income for schools: Silver level schools, having 2+ years in the programme, reported an average net profit of $1,142 for the year – the equivalent of 50% extra to a school’s non-wage budget in some countries.

• Extending teachers’ skillset: An impressive 75% of teachers said they’d used new teaching methods as a result of running the programme.

• Enhancing graduate earnings: An impact study in Uganda found 67% of graduates earned a significant 28% more than the national average income; For any programme to create significant impact requires scalability. Currently costs per student per year stand at US$5 for countries where we’ve achieved scale, and this is projected to fall further.

Help us create more Marys Through continued collaboration with governments, corporates & NGOs we aim to bring the benefits of this programme to over one million young people per year within the next three years.

Tackling the Youth Employment crisis requires going upstream. It’s time to stopping fishing babies out the river and start teaching young people to fish (metaphorically) while they’re still at school.

Young people across the developing world don’t deserve just any ‘education.’

They deserve an ‘education that pays’. They deserve to run a School Enterprise and learn to become Marys.

Partner with us to create this change.

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Chris Nassetta, Hilton President & CEO, flashes the University of Houston “Cougar Paw� sign with student volunteers staffing the Hall of Honor dinner at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management in Houston

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HILTON HOSPITALITY Connecting – Preparing – Employing ONE MILLION YOUNG PEOPLE BY 2019 by

Chris Nassetta, President and CEO, Hilton Chairman, World Travel & Tourism Council I was fortunate enough to find my true calling at the age of 18, when I spent a summer working behind the scenes at a Holiday Inn in Washington, D.C. That’s when I first realised that hospitality is the best industry in the world. And I never looked back.

Stories like mine aren’t unusual: half of all hospitality executives got their start in entry-level hotel jobs. And I have been thinking about that. A lot. I have six daughters, and my girls are part of the largest youth generation in human history. This enormous generation is breaking another, more unenviable record: they’re facing the worst youth unemployment crisis in history. The Economist magazine estimates that as many as 290 million 15-to-24-year-olds are not participating in the labour market. If they had the chance, these 290 million bright minds — a group almost as large as the U.S. population — could be strengthening our communities and bringing fresh solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. By failing to invest the time, energy and resources needed to help these young people succeed, we’re jeopardising the future of the global economy.

That’s why we need urgent action to solve the crisis of youth unemployment.

This crisis has many roots. In some countries, the reasons are cultural — for example, girls may not be receiving the same schooling or job opportunities. In others, the reasons are tied to poor economic conditions or geopolitical issues like the refugee crisis. There’s also a real skills gap. Even in developed economies, where enrolment in upper secondary schools is often near 100 percent, nearly one in five students do not acquire a minimum level of basic skills needed to be gainfully employed. And McKinsey reports that only 43 percent of employers can find enough skilled entrylevel workers. Schooling and technical skills alone aren’t enough; young people also need “soft skills” like communication, problem-solving and cross-cultural competencies to be successful.

In 2014, Hilton partnered with the International Youth Foundation (IYF) to create the first Global Youth Wellbeing Index which examines the real challenges facing young people around the world. In 2017, we released a second edition of the Index, which surveyed thousands of young people in 30 countries. The Index found that today’s youth may be more digitally connected than ever before, but they are largely disconnected from vital skills and economic opportunities. In fact, the Index found that only 11% of youth are experiencing high levels of wellbeing or an abundance of individual opportunities.

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This speaks to an urgent need for partnerships that reconnect youth to viable careers and for increased investment in workforce readiness and skills training. The future of our companies, our countries and our world depend on investment in the next generation. We cannot fail them as a society.

Hilton is using data from the Index to identify the overlap between our business and the needs in countries most at risk, like Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. In these countries, we are working to bring soft skills training into communities and offer workforce readiness training through programmes like Passport to Success® and the Youth Career Initiative.

As raising awareness of career pathways is critical for youth, we’re opening up our hotels to help them discover the vast career opportunities in hospitality. This addresses another problem we face: in the Global Millennium Viewpoints Survey of young people’s views of the world and their futures in it, we found that a significant majority of youth were surprisingly optimistic about their future. In fact, 76% of those surveyed agreed with the statement “I will be able to get the kind of job I want.” When asked what kind of jobs they want, nearly half (47%) answered: jobs in technology. Only 17% viewed working in the hospitality business as an attractive option.

That is because too many of today’s youth think of hotel jobs as dead-end service jobs. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

1. First, we are and always will be a business of people serving people. Technology is an important part of our business, but it will never replace our people. Our young workers will never face the risk of job displacement by automation faced by those who choose jobs in many other industries.

2. Second, as my own story proves: hospitality provides an upward mobility unlike any other industry.

3. Finally, our business invests a lot in making Hilton a great place to work. From flexible work schedules, to unmatched training and development opportunities, to generous benefits like paid parental leave, our first priority is ensuring that our team knows they are at the heart of who we are and what we do.

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Hilton is committed to exposing one million young people to careers in hospitality by 2019 either by employing them directly or by connecting with them through our supply chain and volunteer programs, through our mentorship and training programs, or through our annual Careers@Hilton celebration. Since launching our Open Doors pledge in 2014, we’ve already reached nearly 800,000 young people.

But one thing is certain: as a society, we are still not investing nearly enough in creating opportunities for youth. Multilateral agencies, bilateral donors, corporations and foundations allocated USD $1.8 billion toward youth economic opportunity programmes in developing countries in 2014. While that may sound like a lot, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to their investments in other complex global issues. For example, water and sanitation programmes received nearly $13 billion in 2014, while agricultural development projects received $12.65 billion. (Source: Intl. Youth Foundation and the Centre for Strategic & Intl. Studies)

The good news is we already have an important part of the solution. We know millions of young people are searching for jobs, and there are many sectors within the economy that are looking to hire. In fact, the travel and tourism industry — which, as the world’s largest employer, already employs 255 million people — is expected to generate 86 million new jobs by 2026. Having a strong base of passionate, driven, hardworking employees to fill those jobs is essential to achieving our continued growth.

That’s why companies across our industry are investing in training programmes and partnerships with governments, NGOs and schools to ensure young people are prepared for finding short-term jobs and longer-term career opportunities. But because this issue is bigger than any one company or one industry, and because it’s so multifaceted, we need to expand our response. We urgently need a broader commitment from all sectors to help more young people become employable and employed. We also need to share best practices and investing in open source research on what works so we can make faster and better progress — research like the Global Youth Wellbeing Index which offers so many important signposts on how to improve youth opportunities through key domains like education and training. Finally, it means investing more government dollars in the public-private apprenticeship programmes that have been so successful in getting young people ready for work. Right here in the D.C. area, for example, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe launched an apprenticeship programme during his time in office, as part of a comprehensive effort to help young Virginians join and succeed in the workforce. We need much more of this type of action.

Every day, I see this generation’s energy and fresh ideas firsthand from my six daughters. We have a generation at stake, jobs to fill and economies to grow. It’s imperative that we work together to help all youth in every country advance. My fellow leaders, I challenge you to use the findings from the 2017 Global Youth Wellbeing Index to inform your investments in youth and assess the opportunities you can provide to make futures brighter for our next generation. For my industry and for all of us, there is no more important investment we can make.

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Fighting the Odds by Creating their own Jobs by Dorothea Arndt, CEO, Hand in Hand International “The single most powerful element of youth is our inability to know what’s impossible.” So said American social entrepreneur Adam Braun, capturing the attitude of the young people Hand in Hand meets every day across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, ready to defy the old rules of the game and create opportunities before our eyes.

All they need is just a bit of guidance from organisations like Hand in Hand, a global NGO focused on business and skills training with millions of members worldwide.

In Kenya, unemployment is endemic. According to the UN, despite hosting the region’s largest economy, 39.1% of Kenya’s working-age population is unemployed. 1 in 6 of Kenya’s youth is unemployed, compared to 3% across the border in Rwanda.

These figures are attributed to the glacial growth of formal sector jobs for Kenya’s soaring population: in sub-Saharan Africa just 10% of jobs are now in the formal sector.

80% of unemployed Kenyans are under 34, totalling almost 2 million young Kenyans without clear livelihoods options.

Halima (pictured) is an eighteen-year-old with a seven-month-old son in Kwangare, a Nairobi slum area where most people live on less than $1 a day. Safe drinking water is scarce and expensive, meaning diseases like malaria are rife. As a young unmarried mother, Halima is particularly vulnerable to social stigma and had to drop out of school.

Her main options for the future are to get married off to an older man or piece together odd jobs which makes planning or saving for the future tricky.

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In Afghanistan, poverty continues to rise, also fuelled by widespread unemployment particularly affecting women and young people. According to a joint World Bank and Afghan Government report, almost half of unemployed Afghans are under 25, disproportionately women. Afghanistan has South Asia’s fastest growing population and biggest youth bulge, meaning around 400,000 new jobs need to be created every year. With fewer than 1 in 5 Afghan women working, the picture is not promising for a young Afghan woman looking to make a living.

Frozan is the eldest of four sisters living in Balkh Province, northern Afghanistan.

Almost two-thirds of Balkh’s residents are rural, and more than half are illiterate, particularly women. Frozan’s father is a farmer whose livelihood is being threatened by the effects of climate change. Frozan reports how stretched their finances are: “my father is the only one earning, which is never enough for the entire family…during winter we had to go through tough moments.”

Young women like Frozan and Halima are the kinds of people served by Hand in Hand, which champions entrepreneurship as the route out of cycles of poverty. The model, applied with regional adaptations, facilitates members to unlock entrepreneurial creativity, and learn business skills to lift themselves and their families out of need.

Our model has four steps.

1. Self-Help Groups – provide a support platform to connect members, build confidence and begin group savings and leadership training.

2. Skills and Capacity Building – involves training in business development and financial literacy skills such as bookkeeping. Members launch or enhance micro-enterprises in areas like farming, textiles, soap-making and hairdressing.

3. Enterprise Start-Up Capital Provision – in some countries, members are awarded micro-loans based on business plans, co-signed by their group, and linkage to reliable micro-credit providers. Elsewhere, members receive kits comprising some of the productive assets necessary to their enterprise.

4. Market Linkages – assist members with optimising and growing their enterprises through co-operatives, markets and value chains.

Through these 4 steps, Hand in Hand has helped 2.19 million youth run 2.2 million businesses, creating nearly 3.2 million jobs and transforming over 12 million lives.

In Kenya, alongside the main programme, Hand in Hand runs Entrepreneurship Clubs which encourage school children to nurture their aptitude for enterprise and think beyond the formal sector for their futures. These after-school clubs focus on enterprise skills, leadership and the environment, preparing young people to thrive and become pioneers of climate change adaptation. 11,800 students across Kenya are enrolled in the clubs and each member is eligible for the annual Hand in Hand Youth Awards. This project aligns with the Government of Kenya’s ambition to put entrepreneurship training on the school national curriculum.

Integrated with the Entrepreneurship Clubs is the Peace and Prosperity initiative.

This has the dual role of encouraging entrepreneurship, through the Entrepreneurship Clubs, and mentoring young people away from destructive life paths. Through collaboration with schools, colleges, churches, mosques and other formal and informal groupings of youth, the project empowers young Kenyans to contribute to peace and

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stability while at the same time building flourishing economies. 92% of participants aged over 18 confirm that they are now motivated to start their own enterprises.

Youth employment was also at the heart of our Young Mothers Project in Kenya.

This project mobilised women under the age of 30 who had children and lacked the skills or training to support their young families. The programme combined Hand in Hand’s job creation model with psycho-social support through a partnership with the Swedish NGO Clowns Without Borders. The project helped young mothers like Halima to create 3,700 sustainable enterprises, producing 4,700 jobs.

Halima was introduced to Hand in Hand by her friend Irene, who had been orphaned at 14. At 19, Irene secured a job in a local film rental shop, and she gradually acquired full responsibility for the shop. Running her own business without much knowledge of accounts or financial management, Irene joined a Hand in Hand Self-Help Group in Kawangare, and then persuaded Halima to come too: “In the group we learn that we have to help each other, so that is why I involved Halima in the business: she was just sitting at home, not making any money”.

Halima and Irene’s potential is now being channelled into their shared business.

Through the training they realised that they could diversify their services to boost revenue, and so they took an internal loan from the group to buy a popcorn machine to go with the film rental, as well as a printer-photocopier for offer business services. Their profits reached $120 a month, but 90% of this income was eaten by rent. The enterprising friends recruited Halima’s sister Farida, and their collective savings went to building new premises to house the film rental shop and Farida’s beauty salon, slashing rents to a fifth of what they had been. Irene and Halima’s joint monthly profit has climbed to $200. Halima’s son’s now also has a brighter and more secure future.

9,000 miles away in Balkh, Frozan also signed up to a local Hand in Hand Self-Help Group to learn about business and try to find a way to support her family. The group introduced her to other women to share and learn from each other’s experiences. Frozan realised there was strong local demand for honey. The idea of beekeeping appealed to her and three years later she has 20 modern beehives and is one of her district’s major honey producers. She is making almost $2,000 a year. This covers school expenses for her two younger sisters as well as helping her father with home costs. She is proud to be developing her community’s economy, motivating other girls and women in the village to start businesses. For herself, Frozan plans to continue her education alongside business expansion. “My father is so proud that he tells other people about my success.

That makes me proud, too” she says.

The informal economy offers promise to young people facing hostile economic environments where job markets drying up and there are few options. It is the remedy for the chronic and growing issue of youth unemployment, as it prepares young people for the less formal livelihoods of tomorrow. Moreover, by targeting women, Hand in Hand facilitates women’s economic empowerment for sustainable change from the grassroots. The scale of the problem is massive. But the solutions lie in the minds of the millions of young people around the world, who only need training to turn their sparks of ideas into the next big thing, creating new sustainable jobs with every enterprise.

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Inclusive entrepreneurship skill-training and business management support solutions by

Adriana Poglia and Rob Giddings, Peace Child International Globally, inequality is rising: in 2017, in Africa and Asia wealth per adult fell by more than 1%, compared to a world wealth per adult growth of 4.9%. UNCTAD Data for 2016 shows that 73.12% of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows go to high income countries. Low income countries receive just 0.81%. This clearly demonstrates the inequality of investments between countries. These statistics show that the traditional low-income countries are still economically marginalised, and that the global economic system does not support them to overcome poverty.

Education impacts the type of investment the country can attract. In a global economy increasingly about technology, companies need more high-skilled workers than low-skilled ones meaning low-income countries are further marginalised. Using UNICEF data, low-income countries register on average a primary school attendance rate of 69.7% with an average dropout rate of 16.7%. This compares poorly with high income countries where average attendance is 94.2% with a dropout rate of 1%. Data from secondary schools show low income countries registering an average attendance rate of only 31.7% of the total number of children of secondary school age.

As a result, low-income countries have an average youth literacy rate of just 63.89%, compared to high income countries which register an average literacy rate of 99.12%. With technology being a key driver of economic growth, it is also recognised that the poorest and most vulnerable young people are being increasingly left behind in the technological race.

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What happens to these young people?

Most of them end up working in the informal economy, either in temporary jobs, or running their own business, earning just enough to survive. This is a high-risk lifestyle.

Some only work a few weeks a year. Businesses are run on tiny margins. Income generated from these activities is variable and inconsistent. A business or personal crisis can quickly lead to business failure. To manage this, they hedge their income across a portfolio of activities in a practice known as ‘Mixed Livelihoods.’ If one fails, they can survive from the income of others. For example, if a person is engaged in agriculture and are also running a small market stall, a drop-in demand at the market stall, then they can survive by focusing on their agricultural activities.

The people who run these different activities rarely gain the skills needed to grow a business. This creates a trap in which the person is stuck, constantly trying to earn enough to survive and never being able to predict how much they will actually earn.

This uncertainty means it is difficult to make long-term investments in their business, themselves or even their family, which are essential to escape poverty. In this sense, for the most marginalised, employment means creating a sustainable and predictable income.

What can be done about increasing the incomes of marginalised young people and empower them to earn a predictable and sustainable income?

Most activities in the informal economy involve trading. Entrepreneurial and business management skills are therefore vital. With entrepreneurial skills, a young person can maximise profits, earn a higher income from any small business they choose to engage in, and can identify a viable portfolio of activities to ensure the sustainability of their income. Once they have established a viable business, they should be able to earn a predictable income and eventually move into the formal economy.

In the work of Peace Child Intl., we have worked with young entrepreneurs who have done just this. Yei Neagor in Liberia was running a small business selling cold drinks on the side of the road when she signed up to the Be The Change Academy’s entrepreneurship training. She went through our training course and today she has her own shop and is building a second to rent out. She has 2 employees and pays for herself and her partner to complete university. She has turned her life around.

What to do about low illiteracy?

Traditionally education was done mostly using stories. An obvious example is religious texts, all of which provide guidance on life. This provides PCI’s starting point for designing education courses targeted for illiterate people. Research in education has demonstrated the value of games and pictures in making education more engaging for the pupil and is a key factor for improving educational outcomes.

PCI has designed, tested and proven an entrepreneurial training course that uses stories, games and image-based training tools. These encourage participants to build a strong understanding of underlying business concepts and then apply them in their lives. The “no writing” philosophy encourages the illiterate to participate and engage in the training. Feedback from the participants has been overwhelmingly positive: we have seen a huge reduction in dropout rates.

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The example of Madame Xenab Madame Xenab of Koi village, Kenema District, Sierra Leone joined the BTCA training having never been to school. She always had the idea of starting a business but never had the confidence to do so. She and her husband supported themselves and their children by selling whatever they could grow on their small farm. As a result of the training, she designed a business strategy that involved growing and selling specific items that families need for cooking. She noticed that families often run out of these products because they are hard to find outside the weekly market. She sourced her business finance from her local ‘Su-Su’ group – a rotating savings system common in most low-income countries: each member puts in a set amount each week and each week one member receives a pay-out of the total amount saved. Xenab used her payout to start her business and will use her next pay-out to grow her business.

During the evaluation of our work we came across many stories like Xenab’s. This demonstrates the power of image-based training tools to support marginalised young women gain the entrepreneurial skills they need, and the ability to apply them to their specific marketplace and context.

The lack of Business Management Skills The key challenge that remains is the issue of business management. Illiterate entrepreneurs do not keep records so often neglect to consider general business costs.

This lack of accountability also makes it difficult to prove to a potential lender that their business is profitable, another key factor which causes so many of the world’s most vulnerable young people to remain trapped in the informal economy.

Our experience working with illiterate entrepreneurs, demonstrates that often simple visual techniques can result in improved management: for example, using leaves and stones allows them to count how much of an item remains in stock.

PCI is designing a bespoke business support application that uses visual systems for data entry on mobile phones. Many of these devices have built-in cameras and a voice-recording facility, both of which can be designed to assist illiterate people. This technology will allow illiterate entrepreneurs to keep a historical record of all their transactions and add up all their business expenditures, allowing them to calculate their profit. This will significantly improve the information available to the entrepreneur to assess the demand for their products and improve their decision-making procedures.

Recording transactions also provides the evidence of the businesses profitability over a period of time. This is needed to convince potential lenders to support the young entrepreneur to access the capital they need to grow their business. The app will support marginalised young people to generate a predictable and sustainable income.

The work of PCI demonstrates that such programmes can effectively reach some of the poorest and most marginalised young people in the world and help them to create productive employment and decent livelihoods for themselves. Informal businesses often make a significant but hidden contribution to the economy and can be a key driver for inclusive growth and poverty reduction through youth job creation.

For more information about this project, contact: rob@peacechild.org

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“How should we help young people to develop the entrepreneurial mindset and skills they'll need to succeed in our changing world of work?” by

Julia Deans Julia Deans is the CEO of Futurpreneur Canada, a national non-profit organization that has helped almost 10,000 Canadians aged 18-39 launch start-ups with business coaching, financing, mentoring and other resources.

Work is Changing. Technology will impact job markets more profoundly than the industrial revolution did but most economies are not prepared for disruption challenges.

Predicting jobs of the future is very difficult because the technologies they’ll depend on are not yet mainstream and will have titles we’ve never heard of. Our economies will succeed only if young people can spot, respond to and quickly leverage emerging opportunities to create jobs for themselves and for others. In other words, be entrepreneurial.

We are not, however, equipping young people with the entrepreneurial skillsets and mindsets they will need in the future, and want now. More young people see starting a business as a way to take control of their career, achieve a desired work life balance, and better navigate emerging risks and opportunities. Our collective opportunity is to help them.

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Last year, Futurpreneur Canada asked our best and brightest young entrepreneurs and many influential leaders an important question: “How should we help young people to develop the entrepreneurial mindset and skills they'll need to succeed in our changing world of work?�

Their resounding response? Education, storytelling and peer networks. This is our call to action.

1. Build skills through education Young people can no longer count on having jobs waiting for them when they finish school. Every young person must be prepared to see and act on opportunities throughout their careers. Students need financial and digital literacy education as well as entrepreneurial training to help them develop and create value with their ideas. They need opportunities to tackle real world problems, present and defend their ideas and skills, and practice entrepreneurship through internship and co-op placement programmesand extra-curricular activities.

2. Redefine entrepreneurship through storytelling Billionaire entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and Jack Ma are not realistic role models. By better profiling and celebrating the diverse range of everyday entrepreneurs who fuel our economies, we can redefine entrepreneurial success and destigmatise failure. Storytelling can make entrepreneurship feel attainable for every young person regardless of their gender, colour, race, or religion.

You have to see them to be them.

3. Create communities through peer networks As full-time jobs diminish, people will need strong peer networks to build their careers. People launching and growing businesses, for example, need financing and mentorship, but also benefit from the experience, resources and networks of other entrepreneurs.

Providing collaborative spaces such as incubators and co-working spaces and events facilitates peer-networking. Creating formalised digital networks for entrepreneurs and freelancers also helps, particularly to support peer-networking across borders and by people in small and rural communities.

I strongly encourage action in these three critical areas. We and our organizations have to value and encourage young people and their diversity, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. By embracing the opportunities, we will generate a more entrepreneurial future for our youth, our countries and our Commonwealth.

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In her first speech as Secretary-General, Baroness Patricia Scotland said: “The Commonwealth I now serve covers a third of the globe and over two billion people across the world. 60% of them are below the age of thirty. They are our greatest asset, because our true common wealth is who we are and who we want to become.”

Youth entrepreneurship has been a priority of the Commonwealth’s work for many years, driving such programmes as the Commonwealth Youth Credit Initiative, and the Commonwealth Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs (CAYE). The CAYEs operate 4 x regional coalitions that champion the cause of young entrepreneurs at the local, national, regional and international level, through engaging with governments, the media and the public. The Commonwealth’s Policy Guide on Youth Entrepreneurship, developed jointly with UNCTAD, aims to support policymakers in developing countries to design policies and programmes, and to establish institutions, that will promote youth entrepreneurship and provide the foundation for achieving youth job creation through the development, expansion and growth of youth-led enterprises.

The 2018 Commonwealth Youth Forum The future of the Commonwealth depends on its one billion young people. The Forum provides an opportunity for them to build cross-cultural connections and networks, debate the challenges they face, and agree youth-led initiatives to influence decision makers and ensure that young people have a voice in its future. The Youth Forum also bring forward meaningful recommendations to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (CHOGM). The Commonwealth’s theme for 2018 is “Towards a Common Future” and the 2018 CHOGM, taking place in London in April, reflects this theme by seeking to build a fairer, more sustainable, more secure and more prosperous future for all the peoples of the Commonwealth.

Creating decent jobs is at the heart of that ambition, and several of the essays in the next section have been written by young Commonwealth leaders who recognise the importance of youth job creation and want to see the Commonwealth do more to advocate for serious youth job creation policies amongst its member nations.

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THE CASE FOR URGENT ACTION ON YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

YOUTH SAY WHAT WORKS

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Ocheck Msuva Founder and CEO, Bridge for Change Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

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PREPARING

YOUTH FOR AFTER SCHOOL LIFE THROUGH CAREER CONSULTATION, FACILITATING SELF-LEARNING AND SUPPORTING STUDENT INITIATIVE When I was forced by family circumstances to stop school in 2004, my only thought was how to get back there. In 2009 I managed to do so: I sat my O levels and passed to go to high school. Later, I managed to enter the prestigious University of Dar Es Salaam. Though that was a dream that come true, I quickly realized that being at university did not mean that I have solved all my life problems. I had new challenges, and questions about what to do next? At secondary level, we didn’t have that question: teachers told us that going to university was the answer to every problem.

But – Post-University, I had to answer this question: “How will my life look like?’’

As a child, I’d been forced to live on the street, so where to sleep and what to eat was never a problem for me. At secondary school and university, I involved myself in extra-curricular and volunteer activities and this enabled me to build experience.

I also began to understand the challenges my fellow youth were facing: I was eager to find out what future do they dream about? - what desires are driving their actions?

One thing was very clear: many students struggled to answer these important questions - What is my dream? Where do I want to be? Can I influence the result of my actions?

What new skills do I need to change my reality?

With my experience as a volunteer, I decided to start a youth-led organization. I called it Bridge for Change – as it tried to help youth bridge the change between school/university and the world of work. Our first task was to ask some questions: - Do youth in university have any idea about the career path they should pursue?

- Do they get any guidance on the career options that lie ahead of them?

- How many have ever heard of the concept of career planning?

- Do Out-of-school youth get guidance on how to get what they want out of life?

It quickly became clear that the answers to all these questions was “No!” Career Guidance is an area that has been totally forgotten about in my country: youth have little or no information or knowledge about the options they have in life. I realized that this lack of knowledge and failure to do any kind of career planning, is a major cause of youth unemployment. When youth do not have dreams to focus their energy on, they see no reason why to act. They lack energy and drive. When they do have a dream, they see no clear path to achieving it. But most initiatives addressing youth unemployment focus on training them how to write a good CV. That question comes later. Before they leave school, all youth have to answer four key questions: 1. Who I am?

2. Who do I want to be?

3. How to get there? – and 4. How to keep going?

To answer these questions, I came up with a programme called Career Network Support (CNS.) The gap that CNS works to fill is that only 2% of Tanzanian students ever receive career guidance. As a result, they struggle to understand and plan for their

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future. While many job creation and vocational training schemes are underway, youth's lack of self-awareness and sense of purpose remains a key barrier. They also lack 21st-century skills such as the ability to collaborate and innovate so we started CNS in secondary schools to help young people understand who they are, where their potential lies and then come up with ways to help them be self-learners and answer these key questions by themselves. We want to help youth to thinking about their future while they have the time to shape their character and personality in a way that will help them achieve their dreams and plans. This is the key to unlocking youth potential and resolving the unemployment problem. More effort and resources need to be focused on this area globally by all stake-holders.

CAREER CONSULTATION Deciding on who / what you want to be is not an easy task for youth and our education system in Low Income Countries is not designed to solve this existential challenge that all youth are facing. Another big challenge for the youth to become more innovative and to make them courageous to face their challenges. For that, youth need sensitive consultation about their future, about the possibilities of being someone.

We’ve found that peer to peer Career consultation is one effective approach that helps youth address the employment challenge facing them. Youth who are mentored in our programme feel more possibility of solving the problems they face. With CNS, we have been working to create a “Dreams of Change” network of connected youth who do things: for example, some students have worked together to turn an under-utilized classroom into a Library. It is in that kind of space that we can deliver our peer to peer career consultation sessions, and help each student grow to become better persons.

FACILITATING SELF-LEARNING Instead of investing so much on just providing funds for youth training centres (a good thing) - we should also invest in student-led initiatives like CNS which encourage self-learning. The key to self-learning is to help youth to understand their potential and to believe in themselves. At our centre, every day we have youth who come in to seek support on what to do in their life, and we encourage them to take the lead in designing their future. We have to inspire curiosity in them and provide them with resources to take the initiative to teach themselves the skills they need. For example: we have group of youth who want to take a course on how to manager student affairs on computer coding (courses not being taught in our schools yet, we train them how to get these courses on line and teach themselves. This helps them get the skills they need in the labour market and also helps them to start a business.

SUPPORTING STUDENT INITIATIVES Our aim with CNS is to promote innovation, creativity and skill development for youth. If we can do this, and give youth a chance to show their ability and build their confidence from by supporting their initiatives while they are still in secondary level (14 years up to at least 21) - we will have a chance in Tanzania of equipping our youth with the confidence to do the jobs required by the existing labour market and / or to start their own entrepreneurial adventures in self-employment.

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THE ENTREPRENEURIAL GENERATION

by Lina Maria Useche – Founder and CEO, Alianca Empreendedora, Curitiba, Brazil –

Young people from 18 to 35 years are already the majority among Brazilian entrepreneurs. Whether they are “opportunity entrepreneurs” (entrepreneurs because they want to be) or “necessity entrepreneurs” (entrepreneurs because they have to be), they add innovations to their business and also seek to solve the social and environmental problems of the world.

This enterprising generation comes full of challenges and solutions. Learning to work and make partnerships with them can be very valuable to the more experienced entrepreneurs, just as young people can benefit greatly from the experience of those who have already has been in business for much longer.

Young micro entrepreneurs are more connected than ever and more informed, with access to knowledge that was previously restricted to training courses. Not only that, they can connect in networks and learn from each other via access to the stories of other entrepreneurs. They learn a lot from the lessons of other young people.

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Even though they are at the forefront of innovation, these young people receive little or no support to get started. According to a survey by Aliança Empreendedora, of the more than 600 organizations that support micro-entrepreneurs in Brazil, only 19% declare that they focus on supporting young entrepreneurs, and when the subject is enabling them to access to credit, the percentage drops to almost zero.

It is imperative to create innovative ways to support these young people who want to start their own business to gain access credit. It is necessary to create an environment where entrepreneurs can test their ideas, where they can make mistakes, without being punished, and have the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial skills to enable them to lead fulfilling lives.

Further, it is necessary to promote an entrepreneurial mindset to prepare this generation for the market of the future. If young people already find it difficult to put themselves on the job market today, in a few years it will be much harder. We must invest in the skills of the future.

HAS EDUCATION FAILED STUDENTS AND BUSINESS ON EMPLOYABILITY

by Benjamin Fraser, Caribbean and the Americas Regional Representative The Commonwealth Students’ Association (CSA) The concern of employers globally is that employees have the correct bit of paper but a total inability to effectively apply it and they blame this on failing education systems.

Skills Mismatch Firstly, persistent high levels of unemployment along with job vacancies that remain unfilled are often attributed to skills mismatches - the gap between an individual’s skill and demands of the job market.

The Hays Global Index assesses the dynamics of skilled labour markets across thirty-three countries from all regions of the globe. The report reveals that between 2015 and 2016 there was a global increase in the challenge of business to matching

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available skills with unfilled jobs. On a scale 1-10, 10 being the most unfavourable 15 countries scored at least 6.5.

Employers and industry officials need to be involved in defining curricula and learning outcomes and help deciding which skills the students are being trained in.

Austria has won the attention of the international community for controlling its unemployment rate through its dual education system which is characterized by alternating school-based and company-based training stages; it is always kept up to date through consolidated efforts to forge partnerships between employers and educators.

Soft Skills Secondly, Millennials, which make up the growing portion of the labour force are drawn to STEM careers. Born in the information age, we boast a portfolio of hard technical skills that belie our young age. However, when it comes to soft skills, Millennials fall short. This is frustrating for employers.

In a McKinsey survey of employers of young people in nine countries, 40% of employers said lack of soft skills was the main reason for entry-level job vacancies.

There were gaps in soft skills such as communication, teamwork and punctuality. In the 2016 Payscale report titles “Levelling Up: How to Win the Skill Economy,” critical-thinking, problem-solving, attention to detail, writing proficiency topped the list of skills managers find missing from job-seekers. While formal education leaves graduates technically and academically prepared, their soft skills are severely lacking.

One potential solution is measuring students’ participation in extra-curricular activities. Research has shown that these activities can function as important tools in developing skills. Universities and employers should pay attention to the extent that students and potential employees, participated in them. Non-academic activities demonstrate a young person’s level of commitment to personal growth and should be very attractive to future employers as an indicator of well-developed soft skills.

I participated in the 2016 Summer Youth Employment Programme organized by the National Youth Service of Jamaica. Because of the strong emphasis which my high school placed on participation in extra-curricular activities, I found it easy to function in a work environment and I found the accounting work wasn’t difficult.

Entrepreneurship Thirdly, all levels of education must come to recognise the most essential facet of entrepreneurship: it is a practice, like that of law and medicine, that can be codified, developed and taught. Modern education systems must discontinue its failure to demonstrate an understanding of the fundamental importance of entrepreneurship as an applicable practice. A Swedish study on the impact of entrepreneurship education in high school on long-term entrepreneurial performance revealed that Junior Achievement’s Company Participation Programme increases the probability that an individual will engage in entrepreneurship by starting a firm and that his or her income from these firms will be higher.

I recommend the integration of entrepreneurship in the heart of the education system from beginning to end. It is quite likely the most important step a country can take to help reverse the trends of rising youth unemployment and social dislocation.

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EMPOWER THE YOUTH WITH THE RIGHT SKILLSET AND THE BUSINESSES WILL FLOURISH

by Mfundo Mohammed, (CAYE-SA) Vice Chairman, Commonwealth Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs – Southern Africa Graduation day is meant to be the best day in the life of any young person. In our society, the fact that the young person defied many, often finance-related, odds to make it to University is normally quite a feat in itself. Chances are that some family members’ education was sacrificed to ensure that the young person with the “best chance of making it” continued with their education. After graduation, there is an expectation that the young person will find employment.

This is normally the point at which “black tax” then kicks in. “Black tax” refers to the expectation that when a family member makes it in life, they are expected to share their wealth and income with the rest of the family members who may not have the same ability to generate income.

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This way of thinking is flawed because it suggests that only formal classroom education leads to meaningful employment opportunities. Many young people get caught in the mindset that if they do not finish school, they cannot earn a proper living.

Hence they start feeling sorry for themselves and do not meaningfully pursue other learning & job opportunities.

I therefore urge our national governments to focus on youth-focused VET and skills-training initiatives which will empower the youth with critical skills to become either “employable” or “employers of choice”.

We need more skilled citizens in order to ensure that the entrepreneurs working in existing businesses have access to the right sets of skills to provide high quality services, develop innovative and high-quality products. This will grow their businesses which, in turn, will lead to more employment opportunities for the skilled labour force.

Youth are often described as the demographic dividend. Now is the time for our governments to invest in that dividend by investing, meaningfully, in youth vocational skills training and more grants for the setup of sustainable youth-led businesses.

BUILD ROBUST ENTREPRENEURSHIP ECO-SYSTEMS

by

Shamoy Hajare We are living in a time that has the largest youth population the world has ever seen.

This creates many challenges as young people are impacted by a wide range of socioeconomic and environmental issues. However, this demographic youth bulge also provides opportunities as young people have the potential to create innovative solutions to many of these issues. One major challenge that cripples the ability of young people to reach their full potential is unemployment. The world needs to create over a billion new jobs by 2030 to accommodate existing and future unemployed youth.

One very powerful solution is to empower young people to become creators of jobs in the emerging industries which will play an integral role in transforming our world.

To do this requires the full support of governments, private sector, civil society and

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young people themselves to develop a robust entrepreneurship ecosystem that provides an accommodating environment for youth entrepreneurship to flourish.

It is a fact that many young people have a vested interest in developing enterprising solutions that are beyond creating a livelihood for themselves. These are the creators of many jobs that young people need in the labour market. Many have developed innovative solutions to promote local economic development, combat climate change, create low-tech sustainable energy solutions, promote gender equality and inclusiveness, and several encourage youth participation and transparency in political discourses. However, many of these big enterprising ideas lack key resources that prevent youth enterprises from growing to scale and making lasting impacts. As an entrepreneur myself, I know first-hand the challenges of starting a business.

Without adequate support, a business can easily fail in its first vulnerable years.

I therefore call on policymakers and youth leaders at all levels to join forces to eradicate impediments that prevent the development of a resilient entrepreneurship ecosystem. These range from the current complex and high-cost regulatory systems to a lack of youth-friendly financial products and services. We must act now to foster a culture of entrepreneurship that will promote youth employment and sustainable livelihoods. To do this, there needs to be: i) A more simplified regulatory environment that utilises ICT to create a low-cost business registration and reporting experience ii) The integration of entrepreneurship education at all levels of formal and informal education systems and business development services that meet the needs of young people, match local context, utilise case studies and encourage the integration of ICT, prototyping and research iii) Youth-friendly financial products & services: eg. informal lending mechanisms, start-up and accelerator grants, loan schemes without the traditional collateral requirements – all under-pinned by effective financial literacy training; iv) Incubator and resource hubs that provide on-going technical support, mentoring and coaching, and access to resources and opportunities that support green tech start-ups, social enterprises and other forms of transformative enterprises A society that encourages a youth-centric entrepreneurial culture will create the long-term, decent jobs needed for young people and assist the development of – • Sustainability = ideas for business that strengthen natural ecosystems; • Security = ideas that promote peace and create powerful tools for post-conflict peace-building; • Fairness = ideas that prevent gender segregation, encourage inclusion and fight discrimination; • Prosperity = ideas that create a world that decouples economic growth from environmental degradation and build local economies; Our world depends on the enthusiasm, creativity and passion of young people to build, strengthen and diversify the labour market while promoting sustainable development; Governments and policymakers can facilitate this by investing in the creation of a robust entrepreneurship eco-system for the youth.

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YOUTH EMPLOYMENT FROM THE CAYE PERSPECTIVE

by

Bernard Oduro Takyi, Regional Coordinator, Commonwealth Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs (CAYE) West Africa Poverty is often a result of youth un- and underemployment but, in the 21st Century, the problem is a more pressing one because a critical mass of unemployed youth is a serious catalyst for terrorism and a host of other brewing social vices.

According to World Bank Group 2016 Report on Sub Saharan Africa, 48% of all Graduates remain unemployed at least 5 years after graduation. That begs a more pressing question: “If Graduates are remaining unemployed, then what is happening to the uneducated youth?�

I am a key advocate of the idea that the Business of Government is to create the most enabling and business friendly environment possible to ensure that the right kind of sustainable jobs are created by the Business Community.

Whilst it is increasingly apparent that Governments cannot provide the lasting solutions to the albatross of Youth Unemployment, I believe if governments take the steps below, they will help achieve full employment for the growing youth population: 1. The educational system of most countries ought to be restructured to focus more on practical innovation & creativity, risk taking, self-employment and entrepreneurialism + community problem-solving; 2. National Mentorship and Coaching Policies need to be enacted to ensure that young talent is discovered early and groomed effectively. Once the latent talents of the youth are unearthed and developed, their earning capacities appreciate, and unemployment becomes a non-issue.

3. Governments ought to have a conscious plan and policies to decentralize and localize wealth creation. Wealth creation should be taught from an early age to all school-going children. This will kill the entitlement mentality of young people who currently feel that the Governments owe them a living.

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4.

5.

Governments must promote bi- and multi-lateral entrepreneurships and trade missions for the Youth with the ambition to be job creators. These will provide peer-to-peer experience-sharing and networking which can greatly increase the motivation of young entrepreneurs.

Lastly Governments need to provide reliable and cheap sources of funding to enable youth to secure funding for their business start-up ideas.

HOW GOVERNMENTS CAN ADDRESS YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT

by Nancy Amunga, National coordinator, Commonwealth Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs – East Africa Youth unemployment is a major challenge in the commonwealth countries, considering about 60% of this population are youth; steps must be taken to solve this problem. Because many youth lack basic literacy and numeracy skills, and obstacles to education still remain a great hindrance for many of them, my strategies for doing this are: 1) Keep Youth in School – and – 2) Promote Entrepreneurship. Keeping youth in school can address a number of the risk factors associated with unemployment.

The positive effects of education include the following: • youth who complete secondary education are less likely to fall into poverty; • youth who stay in school to age 15 are less likely to engage in criminal activities; • better educated youth are more trusting of others – and – • more educated youth expands a nation’s social capital and also increases participation in elections, charitable giving and volunteerism.

Many factors determine a student’s motivation to remain in school.

• The quality of the teaching; • The perceived benefits of education; – and – • The education experience generally.

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Significant policies and measures should be put in place by governments particularly with regard to physical infrastructure and lowering the cost of education which in most Commonwealth countries is very expensive and perceived to be a luxury as opposed to being a basic need.

We should seek to harness the innovative spirit of young people in addressing our development challenges. Training and education should promote entrepreneurship and encourage young entrepreneurs to find unique business ideas. Training alone is not enough to help young entrepreneurs survive in the business world. After training, young entrepreneurs all tend to start up more or less the same enterprises. Young people should be helped to identify something unique which is easily found within their environment and can add value to it. So governments should create business incubators in every university and expand vocational training facilities.

And it is not just education: to become a successful entrepreneur, you need an enabling financial environment. Governments should therefore create an environment where access to finance is based more on the borrower’s ability to repay than it is on their possession of physical collateral

POWER TO SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

by Shomy Hasan Chowdhury, WASH activist, Bangladesh Asia Regional Representative of Commonwealth Students’ Association (CSA) As the topic of this Booklet is youth employment, I’d like to share with you my story of being a social entrepreneur – what I call a “Socialpreneur.” Last year, I took part in a competition called the Hult Prize Competition, which is the world’s largest student movement for social good. Every year, President Bill Clinton throws a challenge aligned with some of the SDGs and teams come up with ideas to help 10 million people by the next 5 years, with a prize money of 1 million US Dollar as seed funding. In 2017, I wanted to create an enterprise that addresses an issue I am passionate about: sanitation and hygiene. Poor sanitation and toilets can steal the life

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of a loved one within days, so I feel it is my responsibility to step up in support of the global movement for toilets. My aim is to ensure access to water, sanitation and hygiene for everyone. So I and my team came up with a business model to place 100 portable toilets in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, a city of over 18 million people one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

The name of our project is POUP (Power of Optimizing and Utilizing Poop). We collect the human waste from these toilets and convert it into biogas and organic fertilizer. We have found out that we can benefit over 10 million lives in less than three years through this model. This will create job opportunities, solve the problem of lack of functional public toilets, produce biogas thereby reducing the pressure on nonrenewable energy and, as a by-product, provide cheap organic fertilizer for the agriculture sector. Student leaders like me arrange and participate in their on-campus finals in over 100 countries in the world through this competition every year.

The aim of the Hult Prize is to launch a start-up enterprise that can radically change the world and breed the next generation of social entrepreneurs. There are many other business competitions and similar opportunities available where YOU can participate.

It is not just helping a group of people who you feel passionate about, but also about personal development. We learnt in Economics that Entrepreneurship is the fourth factor of production. By practicing entrepreneurship, one can improve leadership, communication, managerial and networking skills. Hence, our Education systems must focus on Entrepreneurship for national development as a whole.

Entrepreneurs are job creators and not job seekers. This is critical for solving the problem of unemployment - one of today’s most pressing development challenges.

Every year, millions of graduates enter the job market but new jobs are not being produced at the same rate. This is because of a lack of entrepreneurship education and, as a result, less interest among youngsters in starting their own ventures.

Entrepreneurship is a key factor to ensure employability. In some countries, students from domains such as engineering, computer sciences etc. are not given the taste of entrepreneurial zeal because entrepreneurship is always associated with business studies.

We also need to escape the mindset that being an entrepreneur is a second class career, only pursued by those who fail to get to university and get a degree. This attitude discourages and demotivates the students from nurturing their entrepreneurial skills. Because of skills mismatches, many of them end up working in sectors which have no relation to the degrees they acquired.

We need to create an enterprising culture among young men and women by encouraging qualities such as initiative, innovation, creativity and risk-taking. We should raise their awareness of the opportunities and challenges of entrepreneurship and self-employment and give them a better understanding of the role that young people can take in shaping their futures, as well as that of their country, by being entrepreneurial in their working lives and careers.

We need to provide entrepreneurial education in the school curricula so that from a younger age our students learn to develop their entrepreneurial techniques. At the university level, our main objective should be -

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• creating awareness of enterprise and self-employment as a career option for young people; • developing positive attitudes towards sustainable enterprise, self-employment and social entrepreneurship; • providing knowledge and practice about the desirable attributes for starting and operating a successful enterprise; • preparing students to become job creators rather than job seekers through improved understanding of business.

We are the leaders of the Commonwealth. As global citizens and socialpreneurs, we have the power and the responsibility to ensure employability through Entrepreneurship and thus help achieve poverty alleviation.

L EADERSHIP I NITIATIVES – Breathing Life into Communities, One Business at a Time –

by Marshall Bailly II & Antoine F. Eloi, co-founders, Leadership Initiatives, Nigeria Our time interacting with young people in Southern Africa in the early 2000’s, motivated us to turn our conversations about ways to put more power in the hands of youth and young leaders into action. The dearth of young leaders shaping the world of business and politics in Africa, at that time, highlighted a glaring need, and we wanted our efforts to be part of the solution. The focus of our mission would be to provide a platform and resources for young people to feel greater ownership over their short-, medium- and long-term socio-economic circumstances. Where people had taken the risk to bet on themselves and start a small business, we wanted to provide them the support to see their investment of effort and time thrive and begin to generate opportunities for others. From these thoughts, and this passion, Leadership Initiatives was born.

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Leadership Initiatives (LI) works in Bauchi, Nigeria to address the needs of smallbusinesses by partnering with local government and business leaders to provide enterprising individuals with business finance and operation fundamentals training.

These leaders are able to identify obstacles, develop solutions, and create new operating models to grow their business and strengthen their communities. In the short-term, we aim to cultivate business and community leaders who provide a valuable service for or good to their community. In the long term, we aim to establish a cadre of leaders that exhibit a leadership style that is based in accountability, honesty, and transparency.

LI’s successes in supporting and growing profit-generating businesses result from a progressive, three-tiered methodology of Preparation, Training, and Sustainability.

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Preparation. We work with stakeholders in the community to conduct extensive interviews to select the best potential business owners for the program.

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Training. We spend extensive time with the selected businesses to understand their operations, interact with their customers, and assess their competitive landscape.

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Sustainability. After a thorough evaluation of each business, and with support of local businesses and donors, we make strategic investments that address critical business needs, and support the business owners in managing, nurturing, and growing the investment.

This methodology, evolved over the past decade, has yielded many success stories.

From tailoring to auto repair, from hair-dressing to soap making, from irrigation projects to fish farms, we have enabled businesses to stabilize, grow, and generate employment opportunities in their communities.

You may ask, “But why does this matter?” In the developing world, corruption and macro-mismanagement are endemic and, in our opinion, have created an unhealthy dependence on government, hindered entrepreneurial spirit, and rendered many ignorant of the true potential of themselves and their country. Nigeria, with a population of approximately 190 million people, has been unable to effectively capitalize on its human and natural resources, adversely affecting the economic capacity of the nation and the continent. But imagine a Nigeria operating at optimum efficiency, it would create an economic windfall that would transform the economic outlook of Africa and the world. Imagine how stability in Nigeria could deepen the engagement of its talented diaspora and unleash upon the world a wave of creativity and ingenuity it has never known. We believe LI is an accelerating agent in this vision of Nigeria and the continent of Africa. We represent and work with people who will bring this vision to fruition, and we encourage governments, non-governmental organizations, and businesses to join us, and our fellow organizations represented here, in supporting this work.

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