The goal of this document is to help the reader better understand how to strengthen market assessments for youth workforce development programs. It considers issues, such as institutional capacity, local context, appropriate tools and approaches, and including youth in these assessments. The learning product is based on the experiences of three organizations, Education Development Center, Save the Children, and the International Rescue Committee, that conducted market assessment to develop and maintain market-driven youth workforce development programs.

This technical note presents the experience of two organizations- Fundación Paraguaya and Partners of the Americas- whose youth-workforce development programs actively participate in the market, selling the same goods and services that they train their students to provide and/or selling their own services as effective trainers of youth, as a way of both overcoming resource constraints and ensuring program quality and relevance.

This document provides case studies of three different market-driven youth workforce development projects to demonstrate the variety of scale-up strategies of the three initiatives and offers examples and lessons learned. The study of each project has a brief description of the program; gives the rationale for the scale-up strategy selected; and discusses the scale-up activity, sharing challenges and approaches for staying market-driven. In addition, the discussions include specific recommendations drawn from each project’s experience.

This case study documents learning from Fondation Zakoura Microcredit's (FZMC, or Zakoura) “Expanding Financial Services to Vulnerable Youth in Morocco,” or LYKOM (which means “for you” in Arabic), project.

From 2006–2009, Save the Children and Fondation Zakoura Micro-Crédit (Zakoura) partnered to implement a youth financial services and livelihoods promotion project called “Linking Youth with Knowledge and Opportunities in Microfinance,” or LYKOM. The program included financial and business literacy training, savings promotion, and access to credit for youth businesses. This case study examines the challenges Save the Children and Zakoura faced and the ways the institutions sought to address these challenges.

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.

Save the Children and Fondation Zakoura Microcredit (FZMC) are implementing the “Linking Youth with Knowledge and Opportunities in Microfinance,” or LYKOM (which means “for you” in Arabic), project with seed funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and cofinanced with private funding from Save the Children and FZMC. The program includes financial and business literacy training; savings promotion; and access to credit for youth businesses.

Lessons learned include:

This brochure presents the range of innovative interventions in child and youth promotion and provides examples of private sector cooperation. It takes an informative look at projects from various countries in areas such as out-of-school education and the reintegration of young offenders, outlining GTZ best practices and identifying potential cooperation partners.

This paper reports on DFID-funded research by ITDG to develop analytical tools that help development practitioners understand livelihoods involving micro / small-scale enterprise (MSE). The research concerned the roles which:

• private-sector markets play in livelihoods of micro-entrepreneurs and small-scale producers
• technological change (including poor people's own adaptability) has on livelihood opportunities and outcomes

Poverty reduction is the ultimate objective of both the Market Development and Sustainable Livelihoods approaches. However, the means by which to achieve poverty reduction often differ under these approaches. Realising the need to find common grounds of understanding between the two approaches, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) organized a seminar on Making Markets Work for Poor (in short: M4P), looking for complementarities, divergences and synergies with other approaches to poverty reduction.