The USAID/Malawi Education team is interested in building strong alliances to prepare the next generation of Malawian citizens in the workforce. Proposed activities should be responsive to the National Education Sector Plan goals and targets and should help promote knowledge, skills and self-reliance of in and out of school children and youth.
This book explores in detail the challenges facing Africa's youth in their transition from school to work, and proposes a strategy for meeting those challenges. It addresses the importance of investing in youth: not only because by 2010, youth will account for 28% of the population of Africa, but because labor is the most abundant asset in poor households in Africa, and improving the outcomes of labor is a key factor in moving out of poverty.
For many youth in Africa, the educational systems in African nations are not adequate preparation for the workplace, as the curriculum is mostly theoretical. There is often a mismatch of skills, with most educational institutions still offering courses that are no longer relevant to the current job market, given current economic trends. This raises the following questions:
- How is the skills gap defined more specifically, a prerequisite for designing and implementing adequate solutions?
Publisher:The Youth Employment Network (International Labour Organization), International Youth FoundationDate:2009Remote Resource:
The Education Development Center has produced a cross-sectoral assessment of the Youth of Yemen, as part of a EQUIP3 USAID-funded initiative. The Yemen Stability Initiative (YSI) endeavors to address alienation among disaffected, disenfranchised, vulnerable youth ages 15–24. It addresses their difficulties through an array of activities and programs to increase their civic participation, life skills competence, health, violent extremism management and mitigation capabilities, and livelihood opportunities.
The study focused on key youth issues:
In this report, the Middle East Youth Initiative cautions that a new jobs crisis may damage future prospects for the region's young people. For Middle Eastern economies, the global downturn coincides with a historically high share of 15- to 29-year-olds in the total population. This report shows that, even during the “boom” years of 2002 to 2008, young people in the Middle East did not benefit from high-quality education and struggled to find decent jobs.
This Note from the Field provides an overview of the Norwegian Refugee Council's Youth Education Pack (YEP) program in northern Uganda. The YEP program provides war-affected youth with literacy skills, life skills and vocational training. While the program emphasizes basic literacy and psycho-social support, the livelihood skills offered are an integral tool in helping participating youth successfully reintegrate into their communities. The note describes the experience of one youth participant in the program in northern Uganda.
The relationship between wealth and child labor has been widely examined. This paper uses three rounds of time-series, cross-sectional data to examine the relationship between wealth and child labor and schooling. The paper finds that wealth is crucial in determining a child's activities, but that this factor is far from being a sufficient condition to enroll a child in school. This is particularly the case for rural girls. Nonparametric analysis shows a universal increase in school enrollment for rural girls from 1998 to 2006.
The U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) is hereby soliciting proposals for humanitarian projects benefiting Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and other countries with a sizable Iraqi refugee population.
PRM will consider proposals from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with proven track records in implementing refugee assistance programs. Higher consideration will be given to organizations that have well-established operations in the country (or countries) of program activity.
This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design allows the investigation of whether project impact varies with families’ poverty level. Among the poorest families in the study, the impact is positive while it is equal to zero for less poor households. This suggests that for the poorest families the program lifts a credit constraint, while this is not the case for families close to the eligibility threshold.
