New technologies, including the recent progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), are transforming work and jobs worldwide. Climate change is also having an impact on the job market. To thrive in today’s world, young people need a full range of skills and knowledge to work, be active citizens, and live in the 21st century. This blog post explores how UNICEF is supporting young people with the skills they need to succeed in school, work and life.
This knowledge brief highlights the relevance and challenges of business incubation services for youth in rural areas. It showcases learnings from several projects implemented by the World Bank and GIZ and provides examples of design elements of business incubation services for youth in rural areas. These include 1) creating a network-based ecosystem for rural incubation, 2) promoting on-site incubation as opposed to co-working space, 3) guaranteeing access to markets by involving the private sector, 4) Screening entrepreneurs, 5) combining different types of financial sustainability models based on local conditions, and 6) promotion of pro-women incubation to address the "triple burden" faced by young women in rural areas.
This report examines the growing potential of India’s AI-led software as a service (SaaS) start-ups and analyzes the role that the country, which is already a leader in the global software ecosystem, can play in an AI-led future.
This report warns that climate change is already causing widespread losses and damages worldwide. The report focuses on the interactions among the coupled systems climate, ecosystems, and human society.
This report summarizes the key feedback the Canadian government heard from its people relating to Canada's Blue Economy Strategy and outlines how they will react to this information.
This report ilustrates the current state of accounting and reporting solutions, and how they can support businesses in driving the circular transition. The report concludes that the shift to a circular economy requires complex changes to our present ways of doing business. To push forward the circular transition—and to be able to unlock business opportunities in the new circular economy— the current approach to value, impact, and risk must be redefined.
Drawn from CGAP’s in-depth qualitative and quantitative research across five countries, this paper’s insights focus on the potential for financial services to support platform workers and sellers in leveraging the opportunities and mitigating the risks emerging in platform work.
The Online Labour Index 2020 (OLI 2020) allows for new forms of analyses regarding the development of online platform work. In this blog post, authors offer some insights into how these features can be used based on the example of descriptive statistics pointing towards a phenomenon that they call the ‘tech shift’.
South Africa’s paid care economy contributes 13.8% towards total employment in the labour market and is largely undertaken by women – estimated at 84% in Graph 1 below.
Historically, the care economy has been a neglected sector, however, recent attention has been brought to it by South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa. This presents an opportunity to create momentum around expanding solutions for the care economy.
This report is structured to dive into each of the care economy sectors, starting with early childhood development, and then education, healthcare and domestic work. Each section will provide an overview of the sector, specify key operators, outline challenges and bottlenecks, and identify opportunities for targeted investment.
This article draws on 70 interviews in addition to participant observations to highlight the role of gig economy platforms in producing a novel form of reputational insecurity. This insecurity is generated by platforms disrupting the traditional operation of industry reputation in freelance markets.
This document is an overview of the lessons learned from an IFAD project on scaling up rural youth access to inclusive financial services for entrepreneurship and employment implemented in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. It contributes to shaping regional policy dialogues and strategies for supporting youth integration in the rural development space and will inform the design of future youth projects in IFAD.
The EU Blue Economy Report continues to analyse the scope and size of the Blue Economy in the European Union. It aims at providing support to policymakers and stakeholders in the quest for a sustainable development of oceans, coastal resources and, most notably, to the development and implementation of polices and initiatives under the European Green Deal in line with the new approach for a sustainable Blue Economy.
The Mercy Corps Ventures pilot detailed in this report was completed over three months at the start of 2021 to test whether digital stablecoins and mobile wallets could ease frictions and reduce costs in cross-border payments for un/underemployed youth completing microwork in Kenya, and the results are very promising.
This report outlines the case for thinking beyond borders to achieve a sustainable, circular economy that matches environmental goals with social ambitions. It highlights key levers for governments and multilateral bodies, illustrating the benefits of a global, socially just approach to environmental, trade and development policies, and the risks of continuing along current policy pathways.
As Europe goes through its green and digital transformations, high-quality vocational education and training (VET) is key to ensuring people have the right skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow. The Council Recommendation on VET for sustainable competitiveness, social fairness and resilience, adopted in November 2020, sets out the EU’s comprehensive vision and strategic objectives for the future of VET. This brochure outlines this vision and the importance of VET reforms at national level, including key principles and actions to support these reforms.
To shed light on the opportunities and challenges facing women platform workers, as well as to better understand their financial profile and need for financial services, CGAP conducted primary research with women platform workers and sellers.
This research reveals that 77 percent of young people in Asia Pacific aspire to get a green job within the next 10 years. For companies operating in Asia Pacific, this presents a huge opportunity to move rapidly toward their environmentally sustainable business outcomes. The challenge, however, is they need to start acting now to design the jobs that will attract motivated young people of a variety of skill levels.
This document presents the Retirement Savings Laboratorys (Laboratory) main findings, lessons, and challenges from several pilot interventions aimed at promoting voluntary pension savings among independent and low-income workers in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
This ILO report seeks to enhance our understanding of how digital labour platforms are transforming the world of work, and the implications of that transformation for employers and workers.
This paper focuses on key sectors across 21 emerging markets that can be prioritized in post-COVID green recovery efforts. These sectors are grouped around greening existing and future energy infrastructure, building climate-smart cities, and helping speed the transition of key industries to green production practices. Concerted actions by public and private players across these areas can deliver economic recovery in the short and medium term and can deliver long-term sustainable and low-carbon growth.
