SITE SEARCH

This paper focuses on the extent and persistence of the impact of financial crises on youth (15-24) unemployment rate. It presents empirical estimations on the impact of past financial crises on young workers, as well as investigates the relationship between financial crises and youth unemployment rate by employing fixed effects panel estimation on a large panel of countries (about 70) around the world for the period 1980-2005. Gender specific effects of crises, as well as the “persistence" of the impact of financial crises on young workers is also investigated. Its econometric investigations can be useful to better assess its impact on youth unemployment.

This note presents and analyzes the main design features of a variety of non-publicly provided Active Labor Market Programs in Arab-Mediterranean Countries, with a specific focus on programs targeted at youth. Programs from nine countries are included in the inventory: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen.

This paper examines the employment impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in Liberia. Its principal purpose is to explore the potential role that MNEs could play in creating more and better jobs. It is part of a broader study that also includes Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone. This research is intended to provide a timely and meaningful contribution towards tackling national youth employment challenges exacerbated by fourteen years of armed conflict.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East region and one of the poorest in the world. Its population, already overwhelmingly young, is expanding rapidly, creating an explosion in the number of youth aged 15 to 29. In this paper, the authors identify processes through which many Yemeni youth are excluded from the opportunity to become productive adults and positive contributors to society. They present evidence that many youth face social exclusion, whereby they are cut off from the resources and institutions that could assist them in their transition to adulthood.

This paper examines the constraints on young Nigerians looking for employment and explores entrepreneurship programs as a potential short-term intervention to reducing these constraints.

In this paper, the authors analyze factors that contribute or detract from adolescent girls’ intention to participate in training programs in Uganda. The authors focus on BRAC’s Adolescent Development Program, which emphasizes the provision of life skills, entrepreneurship training, and microfinance.

In this audio interview with the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, Jeroo Billimoria talks about how her organization, Aflatoun, fosters childrens’ social and financial awareness. She discusses how the organization works with partners, ensures the quality of its curricula around the world, and works to move such curricula into mainstream schools. Billimoria also shares challenges, course corrections, and the organization’s vision for the next five years.

This paper examines the role of finance in the lives of low-income youth with a focus on the opportunities and challenges of offering them savings services. The opportunities and challenges presented, from the perspectives of policy makers and financial service providers, are not necessarily all proven, but rather potential or possible. This is because both the state of practice and the body of evidence on youth savings is still emerging. Throughout, we share examples of the progress of experimental work that is ongoing. Youth are primarily adolescents who are 10–19 years old, though some examples use different definitions.

Overcoming the related challenges of child labour and the lack of decent work opportunities for youth will be critical to Rwanda’s progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. The effects of child labour and poor youth employment outcomes are well-documented: both can lead to social vulnerability and societal marginalisation, and both can permanently impair productive potential and therefore influence lifetime patterns of employment and pay.

Youth are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, even in economies with strong economic growth (ILO, 2008). This begs the question of what is it about youth that leads to such high rates of unemployment? And what can be done to help young people more efficiently integrate into the labor market?

This Note is a tool to provide policymakers and youth-serving organizations with a framework to better diagnose short- to medium-run constraints facing the stock of unemployed youth and to design evidence based youth employment interventions.

This toolkit was developed by Enlace and XacBank as part of The SEEP Network’s Innovations in Youth Financial Services Practitioner Learning Program (PLP), in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation. The purpose of this toolkit is to explore key differences in marketing financial services to youth as compared to adults and to provide tools for practitioners looking to scale up their services through marketing. The objective of this toolkit is to help organizations think through how to effectively market to youth in three critical stages—design, implementation, and evaluation—to reach more young clients in different market segments with innovative financial products and services.

In this blog, Schumpeter argues that entrepreneurship may be the solution for high youth unemployment around the globe, and especially in the Middle East.