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. It shares the benefits and challenges of different approaches to market assessment and provides lessons learned and recommendations.
This publication is part of a series resulting from the SEEP Network “Youth Workforce Development: Using 100% Market-Driven Programs to Achieve 100% Employment” Practitioner Learning Program (PLP). The objective of the program is to identify, encourage, and disseminate the replicable strategies for market-driven programs that improve youth employment success and measure the effectiveness of these strategies.
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 publication is part of a series resulting from the SEEP Network “Youth Workforce Development: Using 100% Market-Driven Programs to Achieve 100% Employment” Practitioner Learning Program (PLP). The objective of the program is to identify, encourage, and disseminate the replicable strategies for market-driven programs that improve youth employment success and measure the effectiveness of these strategies.
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 publication is part of a series resulting from the SEEP Network “Youth Workforce Development: Using 100% Market-Driven Programs to Achieve 100% Employment” Practitioner Learning Program (PLP). The objective of the program is to identify, encourage, and disseminate the replicable strategies for market-driven programs that improve youth employment success and measure the effectiveness of these strategies.
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.
The LYKOM objectives are as follows:
- Enhance and extend financial and non-financial services available to youth (15-24) and members of their households in Morocco;
- Develop a system to retain vulnerable youth in a program that prepares them to access appropriate financial services; and
- Foster inter-agency linkages for successful delivery of financial and non-financial services.
Lessons learned include:
- Entrepreneurial skills training is not appreciated by all youth;
- The notion of ‘small enterprises’ and of growing businesses gradually is not well understood;
- Current minimum savings levels at La Poste (post office) may be a barrier to youth savings;
- Parents’ influence is strong, and programs may need to change negative parental attitudes about entrepreneurial activity.
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 document examines the institutional, local market, and programmatic difficulties encountered, and offers recommendations and lessons learned.
