Job Title: Technical Project Specialist (Workforce & Youth Development Advisor)
Grade: GS-301-13
Area of Consideration: All Sources

Canditates for this position must be U.S. citizens and be able to be security cleared for assignment. This is a 13 month Temporary, Schedule B appointment, with possible extension of up to 5 years.

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 document shares three brief case studies, from Partners of the Americas in South America, the International Rescue Committee in West Africa, and Education Development Center in Haiti, that show how youth workforce development programs can form partnerships to help them be more market driven. These case studies showcase three different partnerships that help implementing organizations maintain and deepen a market orientation. The three practitioner agencies share their experiences and recommendations in forming partnerships to improve market focus.

This document presents some of the basic principles and sample indicators of performance management that may help practitioners interested in monitoring and evaluation for youth-workforce development projects that are market driven.

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.

The overall objective of USAID/Nicaragua’s sustainable tourism activity is to assist Nicaragua in expanding the economic benefits of tourism to the less advantaged through the growth of small businesses, the protection of the country’s environment and natural resources, and improvement in the quality of public education and outreach.

In the near future, USAID/Yemen intends to announce a full and open competition to implement the Mission’s Community Livelihoods Project (CLP) subject to the availability of funds. This integrated, flexible, multi-sectoral initiative will serve as the flagship project for the Mission’s implementation of the 2010-2012 USAID/Yemen Strategy. CLP is not a traditional development initiative, but it will rely heavily on tried and proven as well as innovative tools transition and development environments.