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 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.

As the Education for All (EFA) process is progreessing, two main groups of children continue to be left out: children who do not have access to a good primary school and children who do not get to attend even when an adequate, affordable school is accessible (the hard-to-reach children). This report considers the reasons why children will work instead of going to school, proposes strategies for addressing these reasons, and makes policy recommendations for extending EFA to hard-to-reach children.

Building the capacity of youth to be workforce-ready and equipped with entrepreneurial skills is a common method of addressing economic development needs in economies in which youth are the largest sector of the population and/or the sector of population that has the lowest employment rates. It is particularly important in post-conflict areas, with many children acting as heads-of-households and without the skills to provide for their families through employment or entrepreneurship.

Building the capacity of youth to be workforce-ready and equipped with entrepreneurial skills is a common method of addressing economic development needs in economies in which youth are the largest sector of the population and/or the sector of population that has the lowest employment rates. However, so often youth are guided into enterprises that have low market potential, are not meeting immediate community needs, that are socially or environmentally unsustainable, or that are replications of other businesses that are already run extensively throughout the community. By assessing opportunities for youth prior to their training, and incorporating an understanding of the need to assess the environmental implications of any business or industry development, and related real growth opportunities in regards to resource availability, these programs can truly achieve success and sustainability.

The SEEP PLP for Youth and Workforce Development was initiated to identify, encourage, and disseminate replicable strategies for using market-driven program design to improve youth employment success and for measuring the effectiveness of these strategies.

NAJAH is a USAID-funded program aimed at increasing employability among Jordanian youth aged 18 - 24. As part of the program, NAJAH:

• Builds youth employability and entrepreneurship skills with a focus on soft skills that help youth ‘to be’, ‘to do’, ‘to know’ and ‘to relate’.
• Fosters positive attitudes towards work, available job opportunities among youth and their parents.
• Supports youth to put learned skills and positive attitudes into practice.