This study aims to identify what works, how and why to re-engage and retain out-of-school and at-risk adolescents and youth in education and explore for out-of-school adolescents and youth of secondary school age by country income group.  

This report focuses on the importance of youth for rural development, constraints that they face, and how to embed rural youth policy and investments in broader rural development strategies.

Using data collected from microenterprises in Gaborone, Botswana, this paper finds that women who cross over into male dominated sectors make higher profits and grow larger firms in terms of number of employees compared to women who operate businesses in female-concentrated sectors.

UN Women has developed Empowering Women Migrant Workers from South Asia: Toolkit for Gender-Responsive Employment and Recruitment. The Toolkit provides guidance on ensuring the protection and promotion of the rights of women migrant workers throughout the labour migration cycle.

There are over 1.2 billion adolescents in the world today, an all-time high. The vast majority of these 10-to-19-year-olds live in lower and middle-income countries (LMICs). Adolescence is a transformational phase of human life, but also a period of heightened risk and vulnerability. International literature identifies quality secondary education as a pivotal factor in raising future opportunities for adolescents. This publication explores the critical difference quality secondary education makes for adolescents, especially for adolescent girls and other vulnerable groups, explains VVOB's three priority dimensions of action for quality secondary education, and shares how VVOB puts this approach into practice in Rwanda, DR Congo, Uganda, Cambodia, Ecuador and Suriname.

The paper presents a qualitative case study of individuals who were all trained to be online freelancers using digital “gig” work platforms (e.g., Upwork) by “Virtualahan,” a social enterprise based in the Philippines. The findings indicate that online technology-facilitated employment has broader implications than an improved financial situation. Employment through online technology increased the informants self-confidence and how their families perceive them. 

This note analyses the gender profile of youth not in employment, education, or training (NEETs) in Georgia and Armenia according to individual and household characteristics, the gender differences in the school-to-work pathways, and the characteristics or risk factors that are correlated to being NEET and their differential effect between men and women.

This study draws on academic research and IFC’s experience with the private sector in FCS to derive lessons on how to engage with the private sector to foster growth, job creation, and stability.

Rural youth development focuses on three mutually-reinforcing factors: productivity, connectivity, and agency. The IFAD 2019 Rural Development Report creates a roadmap for development strategies that incorporate a focus on rural youth. 

This report connects different social and economic dimensions and looks at the key trends of the future of work from a disability perspective. It provides recommendations of action needed to shape the future of work in a more disability-inclusive way.

This webinar aims to improve the mental health of vulnerable populations with high exposure to trauma and limited access to mental health services, including communities in conflict and post-conflict settings and aims to equip community mentors with facilitation skills and curriculum resources to deliver evidence-based mind-body therapy programs.

This paper offers practical and relevant insights, including case studies capturing the journey of setting up private sector initiatives with refugee populations. It looks at their progress to date and key takeaways.

This report examines the workplace challenges and barriers facing disabled people and considers solutions to some of the key issues. It looks at the impact on disabled people where they cannot access adequate support and what works in improving their employment prospects.

The objective of the report is to explore the overarching factors in the Central African Republic (CAR) that contribute to the out-of-school youth phenomenon to provide recommendations for improving existing policies and programs.

The data book illustrates the progress towards gender equality for 217 economies around the world. It provides comparable statistics for women and men for the years 2000 and 2017 across a range of indicators covering education, health, and related services, economic structure, participation and access to resources, public life and decision making, and agency. 

This report examines how public policies at national, regional, and local levels can support job creation, economic growth and social inclusion by overcoming obstacles to business start-ups and self-employment by people from disadvantaged or under-represented groups in entrepreneurship. It shows substantial potential to combat unemployment and increase labor market participation by facilitating business creation in populations such as women, youth with disabilities, the unemployed, and immigrants.

This study presents novel evidence from Lebanon on the impact of offering a volunteering program that consisted of inter-community volunteering activities and soft skills training on self-reported social cohesion values in the short term. 
 

This webinar discusses the role of economic empowerment in creating a holistic approach to building youth resilience to extremism in USAID’s Kenya Youth Employment and Skills (K-YES) program. The K-YES program takes a whole-of-society approach to build multi-layered resiliency for youth in preventing violent extremism.

This brief provides a roadmap to design, procure, and use AI to benefit and not discriminate against qualified individuals with disabilities, including a policy framework, discussion of challenges and opportunities regarding recruiting, hiring, and provision of reasonable accommodations guiding principles. 

To gain new insight into how women’s employment and entrepreneurship choices are affected by legal gender discrimination, this study examines ten years of Women, Business and the Law data through an index structured around the economic decisions women make as they go through different stages of their working lives.