LIBRARY RESOURCE

Despite considerable progress made in understanding the importance of soft skills for positive youth development and gathering evidence, challenges remain to developing effective and contextualized soft skills curricula, successfully measuring these skills, and interpreting the results. Presenters and attendees discussed what we know about the importance of soft skills in different contexts in LMICs, how we adapt and teach them, and how we measure them.

Incubators and accelerators are playing a larger role in startup communities around the world, and growing number target young social impact entrepreneurs. Yet the differences between incubators and accelerators is often not well defined or understood and, when it comes to quality, not all incubators and accelerators created equal. Although early evidence signals their potential to improve startups’ outcomes, and for these benefits to spill over into the broader startup community, the measurable impact of incubators and accelerators on performance varies widely among programs.

Youth succeed when they have adequate support systems in place that encourage socioeconomic success. The enabling environment refers to the people in a child's life that model the key skills for success later in life. How can parents, mentors, teachers and employeers interact with youth without stifiling individual development?

Search Institute establishes a framework for influential figures in a child's life, while Save the Children and FHI360 demonstate how this framework can be practically applied.

Over many years the Commonwealth Secretariat has made concerted efforts to encourage youth entrepreneurship as a pragmatic strategy to address spiralling youth unemployment and to positively harness young people’s potential.