The Punjab Economic Opportunity Programme: Evaluating Markets for Skill Acquisition and Employment project has examined the complete scope of all relevant decisions being made in the vocational skills market in target districts in Pakistan. This includes determining what courses to offer, examining the drivers of low take-up, relieving access constraints to markets, and returns to…
RCT
Addressing Gender Inequalities in Earnings and Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa through Innovative Approaches
Youth employment and micro, small and medium sized enterprise (MSME) development are often in the public debate. Governments in Africa have introduced a number of programmes to promote employment via these mechanisms, but the understanding of which interventions are most effective and for which types of individuals they have an impact is limited. Furthermore, women…
High-Risk Youth in Post-Conflict Liberia
How can governments and NGOs raise employment and reduce the risk of violence among these poor and risky populations? Aid programmes increasingly focus on helping youth through markets, especially through microenterprise development. The logic of this assistance, however, rests on the existence of market failures among the poorest of the poor: imperfect credit markets, or…
Building Management Hierarchies for Growth in LICs
We evaluate the impact of and demand for mid-level management training in a group of garment factories in Bangladesh. Industry participants recognise that there exists a shortage of skills needed to fill in lower-level management positions. There are several reasons firms may fail to provide socially optimal levels of training, and the project is designed…
Start-Up Capital for Youth
Unemployment among young people is one of the most pressing social and economic problems facing less developed countries today. Data from the 2005 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey found that approximately 21% of youths are unemployed, and a further 25% are neither in school nor working. While the traditional academic schooling track offers large labour…
Assisting Job Search in Low-Employment Communities
Jobs are hard to find in Africa. Searching for jobs in African labour markets is expensive and time consuming. Job seekers, the young unemployed in particular, find it hard to be selected for the available positions. As a result, new employment opportunities are often not shared equally. Many economies in sub-Saharan Africa have achieved high…
Food Constraints and “Ganyu” Labour
Small-scale farming continues to be the principal source of employment and income for a majority of the population in low-income countries. Zambia is no exception: in 2008, 80% of employment was in agriculture. Even though Zambia has recently been re-classified as lower middle-income country primarily due to its large copper and cobalt exports, most Zambian…
Public Works Programs and Farm Household Behaviour
Public Works Programs (PWPs) are important tools for social protection. At the time of the beginning of the project, there were 167 PWPs in 29 sub-Saharan Africa. There are short-term and long-term PWPs. Short-term PWPs can stabilise consumption in response to individual or aggregate shocks. Long-term programs, on the other hand, are forms of insurance….
Girls Empowered by Microfranchising
Integrating young adults into the formal labour market is a major challenge facing developing nations, particularly in Africa (World Bank 2007). High levels of unemployment, especially among youth, have led many policymakers to advocate microfinance (cf Yunus 1999) and other forms of credit market expansion aimed at promoting entrepreneurship. However, empirical evidence on the overall…
Reducing Extreme Poverty through Skill Training for Industry Job Placement
Bangladesh has been experiencing remarkable growth in the ready-made garments (RMG) industries for the last three decades. It has become an integral and major part of Bangladesh’s economy, which contributes 13 percent of GDP and 75 percent of export earnings. For instance, in 1983 there were some forty thousand people employed in the RMG sector;…