Young people are more likely to be unemployed or insecurely employed than older workers. Youth are last hired and first fired, they have fewer skills and less experience, and they are less likely to have contacts in the world of work than older workers.
Unemployment and underemployment while young can be very costly, both for individuals and for society. It leads to lower lifetime income, it can drive young people out of the labor force altogether, and it is correlated with crime, violence, and social unrest.
The Jobs Group is organizing its youth employment activities around four pillars:
1) Linking stakeholders involved in funding, implementing, and supporting youth employment programs and policies. This involves building a global coalition to facilitate information exchange and to enhance capacity and commitment among the key stakeholders, and support evidence-based advocacy.
2) Investing in and promoting innovative, scalable, sustainable solutions to enhance youth employment and productivity. Under this initiative, small scale pilot programs/projects will be implemented by client country governments and private/civil society partners. World Bank teams will help support project preparation and supervision of pilot programs and projects. This might also include training activities implemented by a suitable Bank team, client countries, or private/civil society partners.
3) Systematic learning and sharing of evidence from these programs; this includes collecting and tracking core youth labor market data, monitoring and evaluating youth programs, developing tools and guidelines for program design based on country experiences and promoting systematic information sharing and exchange.
4) Leveraging the actions of stakeholders from civil society and the private and public sectors in developing countries to support the design and implementation of evidence-informed youth development and employment investments at sufficient scale, and to address program and policy coordination failures.
