Solutions for Youth Employment - S4YE

06/27/2025

🧑‍🌾 In the face of high levels of food insecurity, how do you build resilience in low and middle-income countries where two billion people lack adequate coverage?

Social protection systems that are well-designed and flexible can remain functional in crisis and reach more people where it matters most.

In this Foreign Policy article, Iffath Sharif, Global Director for Social Protection and Labor at The World Bank and Jonathan Papoulidis, Vice President for the Hungry explore how linking social protection and food systems through integrated, systems-level approaches can strengthen resilience in fragile settings.

They highlight the need for a shared resilience framework in areas where both food and social protection systems can better absorb, adapt, and transform in the face of crisis – helping create employment, and ensure long-term growth and stability.

➡️ Click here for an interesting read on how governments and partners can better respond to shocks by aligning investments and policies across both systems:

Leveraging Social Protection and Food Systems in Fragile Contexts

06/19/2025

🎓 🏛️ In Africa and South Asia, a significant number of young graduates find themselves lacking the required skills to secure a decent job. How can we rethink education and embrace innovations to help young people effectively transition from classroom to workplace?

🏦 One promising solution is the implementation of alternative learning models such as “earn and learn” programs that allow students to gain work experience while earning an income. These initiatives help keep low-income students in school and allow organizations to target skills gaps and reduce their own training costs.

🤝 Discover initiatives that work and how strategic collaboration between universities and employers benefit the youth:

In Africa, an estimated two-thirds of the population is below 24 years, and many—including university graduates—lack decent jobs. In South Asia, more than half of young people graduate without the skills required to secure a job by 2030. Yet, as the youth population surges worldwide, the big que...

06/17/2025

🧑👩 Many young men and women enter the workforce with limited opportunities. The World Bank, through the Jobs Council, focuses on scalable strategies that deliver lasting impact, ensuring young people find decent work.

With the right investments in place, these five sectors create promising jobs: agribusiness, healthcare, energy and infrastructure, manufacturing, and tourism. 👩‍🌾 👨‍⚕️ ⚡ ⚙️ 🏖️

➡️ Hear from Michelle Bachelet, Former President of Chile and Jobs Council Co-chair: https://youtu.be/oZ1pIpdUzK8?si=_VxFIU-TS9JqR_9l

06/13/2025

🚘 In Southeast Asia, “Let’s Grab” has become a buzzword. Listen to the CEO of one of the region’s most innovative companies discuss how their digital services are transforming the way people earn a living.

💻 Hear Youmina’s story as a student empowered by digital learning and understand how access to digital tools is essential for young people seeking to broaden their opportunities.

📈 Discover how digital systems in Mozambique enable the faster creation of companies and ease the importation of goods through a single-window system.

➡️ Explore all these topics and more on The Development Podcast from The World Bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/podcast/2025/06/05/why-digital-transformation-matters-development-podcast

06/11/2025

🧑‍💻 What are practical innovations in Artificial Intelligence?

Discover how is transforming skills identification and taxonomies in the UK and other regions. Researchers from the University of Warwick will showcase how AI can help bridge critical gaps in labor market intelligence and help inform better policymaking.

⚙️ What can these tools show about youth skills and employability?

👤 Join us in this webinar and learn more “Skills for the Future” on June 12 at 9AM-10:30AM ET!

➡️ Register Now: https://bit.ly/4jAyzIP

06/09/2025

🏫 Quiet pavements buzz with the excited chatter of students. Labs are filled with collaborative energy. Professors who turned down better paying careers in Europe, Canada and the United States to build local research labs addressing their country’s pressing needs walk their halls. This is the campus feel of 80 African Centers of Excellence (ACE) hosted in 50 universities across 20 countries.

🧑‍🎓 Launched in 2014 to help the wave of new graduates enter the job market and find formal employment, ACE aims to create research hubs that train a new generation of African scientists locally, strengthening the quality of education with international standards. It has trained thousands of students in key fields such as health, agriculture, energy, digital technology, and the environment. It equips Africa’s youth with the skills to meet the youth employment challenge in the next decade.

🏙️ In 2019, ACE’s priorities expanded not just on academic excellence but also aligned training programs with labor market needs as ties with private sector strengthened and programs took economic, social and industrial relevance. Today, it is World Bank’s largest regional higher education program in Africa. Over 90,000 students have been trained and more than 52,000 young people received short-term professional training.

➡️ Check out what else is going on with ACE:

Over the past decade, the African Centers of Excellence (ACE) have trained thousands of students in key fields such as health, agriculture, digital technology, energy, and the environment. But behind the numbers lies a powerful ambition: to equip Africa’s youth with the skills to meet the continen...

06/06/2025

🧑‍💻 How do we build digital jobs in the Caribbean bit by bit?

Reliable digital infrastructure and relevant ICT skills are crucial in creating jobs in a region facing a growing youth employment challenge.

🏫 Schools lack internet capacity to serve large student populations and slow speeds affect competitiveness of key industries like tourism. Women and youth are particularly affected, with less access to build digital skills or launch tech-driven enterprises.

🌎 World Bank's Caribbean Regional Communications Infrastructure Program (CARCIP) invest in reliable infrastructure in disaster-prone islands and provide IT/ITES training and certification to equip youth and entrepreneurs with skills, closing the skills gap and creating digital job opportunities.

Here are some project highlights:

✅ High-speed internet expanded across the Caribbean from 30% in 2012 to over 75% in 2024

✅ Over 11,000 people pursued IT/ITES certifications, achieving up to a 65% employment rate among those with technical qualifications

✅Across the region, women constitute up to 54% of new broadband adopters, expanding economic possibilities for underserved groups

➡️ Learn more about CARCIP and the Caribbean Digital Transformation Project (CARDT) and how it has equipped schools with digital tools, provided teacher training, and created digital camps for youth:

Expanding digital jobs, enhancing development, and driving digital transformation across Latin America and the Caribbean, boosting connectivity and IT certifications for economic growth.

06/02/2025

👨‍🌾 About 85% of the young Kenyans rely on informal, low-quality jobs that prevents access to wage employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. This rising number of young people in the working population – the youth dividend – have poor employment prospects due to lack of skills or work experience, insufficient job creation and labor demand, and information imperfections in the labor market.

The World Bank’s Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) addresses the three-fold youth employment challenge through

➡️ skills training (life skills, core business skills, and on-the-job training),
➡️ entrepreneurship support (seed grants, business development services, and a business plan competition), and
➡️ access to relevant job market information (creation of a central platform to connect youth and jobs and an improved Labor Market Information System or LMIS).

The results were impressive:

✅ More than 145,000 young Kenyans participated in the program
✅ Employment creation of 125,000 direct jobs and 30,000 indirect jobs
✅ Beneficiaries have 50% higher earnings, higher business start-up rates (65%), greater business survival rates (85%), higher sales (91%) and higher profits (90%)

👤 KYEOP boosted youth employment across Kenya and the National Youth Opportunities Towards Advancement (NYOTA) project builds on its success by providing young people with the right skills demanded by employers and linking them to relevant work opportunities as well as supporting youth entrepreneurship and savings.

🌎 Find out more about these projects and how The World Bank invests in Kenya’s next generation:

Through skills, training, and entrepreneurship support Kenya created 155,000 jobs, boosting youth employment. Young Kenyans saw employment rates rise from 70% to 85%. Beneficiaries received business support, allowing start-ups to thrive.

05/30/2025

The struggle is real. 💪

🏙️ In , 57% of its labor force are young individuals, many of whom still struggle to find work despite the rise of urbanization and the growing population. So how do we create more and better jobs that benefit those aged 18 to 35 and unlock this demographic potential?

🧑‍🌾 The World Bank supports a dual-track approach to Cameroon’s youth employment challenge by providing $10,000 to $20,000 grants to emerging entrepreneurs in the Business Plan Competition (BPC) program and helping unemployed urban youth launch or grow micro-enterprises through the Economic Inclusion of Youth (EIY) program.

📈 BPC supports emerging entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses and generate employment, while EIY helps youth with limited resources and few job prospects to create their own employment.

➡️ Read more on how these programs help empower the youth by giving them the necessary entrepreneurial tools and skills, inspiring a new generation of young business owners in :

Cameroon is implementing a dual-track approach to youth employment through the Adaptive Safety Nets and Economic Inclusion Project, supported by the World Bank. Two innovative programs under this project are helping to unlock opportunity for thousands of young people in the country’s main cities.

05/23/2025

🎧Listen to Solutions for Youth Employment - S4YE’s Work in Progress podcast episode with Volvo on youth employment. Johan Reiman, Director of Corporate Responsibility at Volvo Group talks about the skills gap for youth in Africa, training and curriculum development to address these challenges, public-private development programs, female participation in the transport industry, and more!

➡️Tune in now:

Listen Now - S4YE's “Work in Progress” Podcast Episode with Volvo on Youth Employment! In this conversation, Apoorva Reddy Neelapu, Program Officer at the W...

05/20/2025

🎧 Tune in to Solutions for Youth Employment - S4YE’s Work in Progress: Insights into the evolving landscape of youth employment, skills and job trends, and practices. In this episode, S4YE chats with Bettina Schaller, SVP Head of Group Public Affairs at The Adecco Group.

➡️ Learn more about labor market trends such as the impact of and technology and how the demand for young people are changing:

In Episode 3, we're chatting with Bettina Schaller, the Head of Public Affairs at The Adecco Group. Bettina discusses companies focusing on employee well-bei...

05/17/2025

🎧 Listen to a young person’s inspiring journey in the world of work and opportunity and how in the private sector is crucial in creating value chains for additional

With 1.2 billion young people in emerging economies reaching working age over the next decade—and only about 420 million jobs expected to be generated—the urgency of finding scalable and sustainable solutions has never been greater. In this episode of The Development Podcast, we hear from one yo...