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Originally published by Devex on March 18, 2015.

Agriculture is the single-largest source of income for rural Africans and contributes to a quarter of the continent’s gross domestic product. The sector occupies more than 70 percent of the labor force in Africa’s low-income countries and contributes to food security and poverty reduction.

Tanzania is facing a youth unemployment crisis. The World Bank has reported that around 900,000 young people enter the country’s job market annually, but only 50,000 to 60,000 formal sector jobs are created each year. With more than 66 percent of the population under 25, this job shortage will keep rising.

Originally posted on the Huffington Post on March 3, 2015

Evidence from the General Educational Development (GED) testing programme in the United States shows the importance of non-cognitive skills. The GED is an achievement test which dropouts can take to certify that they are equivalent to secondary school graduates. The programme is based on the widely held belief that tests capture the important skills learned in school. On the surface, the programme is successful. Based on test scores, GED recipients are just as smart as high school graduates. 

Making Cents International has been providing technical assistance in the area of workforce development for the Lebanon Industry Value Chain Development (LIVCD) project, a five-year, $41.7 million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program implemented by DAI, aimed at improving Lebanon’s economic stability and providing income-generating opportunities for small business while creating jobs for the rural population, in particular women and youth.

The importance of small- and medium-sized enterprises for a nation’s economy cannot be stressed enough. They contribute to 33 percent of GDP in developing economies and nearly 64 percent in developed countries. They are also strong job multipliers and innovation generators. In recent years, we’ve seen multiple game-changing innovations by startups, and often led by entrepreneurs in their 20s or 30s.

Originally published by the World Economic Forum on April 9, 2015. 

Originally published by USAID on April 10, 2015. 

How volunteers from the Jamaican diaspora community are tackling unemployment and helping youth in Jamaica become entrepreneurs.

“Life was the same old same old and not full of opportunities. Since leaving secondary school, I have been struggling to get a job,” said 20-year-old Jovan Ottey.

Unfortunately, Ottey’s situation is common, as so many other young people his age struggle every day to find work in Jamaica.

Originally published by The Guardian on April 13, 2015

Many people wonder what kind of planet we’re leaving behind for our children. But few ask: what kind of children are we leaving behind for our planet?

In recent weeks, unprecedented acts of cruelty and violence have dominated world headlines in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries where we work, including Tunisia[i] and Yemen.[ii]  While politics and religion are dissected as drivers of terrorism, the underlying economic cause and effect seems to receive far less attention and debate.[iii] For MENA’s youth, the reality is that economics

Illiteracy rates in West Africa were the highest in the world in 2009, but as recently as 2013 the World Bank reported that things were turning around. Across the region, many more children, especially girls, were enrolling in primary school.