A rapidly urbanizing world presents enormous economic opportunities for the poor and vulnerable but also significant barriers to economic inclusion. This report provides an overview of the urban context and challenges, describes a framework for fostering urban economic inclusion, and examines the current landscape of economic inclusion programs, starting with the policy impetus driving their emergence.
This report explores the latest AI applications and trends in emerging markets and includes several examples of how AI is expanding opportunities and contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The report offers initial findings and recommendations to development organizations, policymakers, and other private and public stakeholders seeking to address barriers to employment and to promote opportunities for refugee women in the digital workforce in Jordan and Lebanon.
This strategic brief shows aquatic food systems have the potential to provide livelihood opportunities for youth but challenges remain for them to join the sector. Multisector initiatives to improve access to training and finance as well as promote digital innovation can improve the participation of youth in fisheries, aquaculture and associated value chains.
Buildher aims to equip women in Kenya with accredited construction skills, which are expected to allow beneficiaries to have greater financial independence and prosperity, to change male attitudes and to promote gender equality within the construction industry.
Building on the success of the Resilience Academy and Open Cities programs, the objective of this pilot study is to explore the feasibility of establishing a Digital Works for Urban Resilience Program, targeting local populations who have been impacted by COVID-19 restrictions.
This paper assesses the link between human capital, emission and technological change, using OECD data on employed individuals’ cognitive skills as well as industrial emissions. The findings demonstrate that higher levels of cognitive skills are associated with employment in industries that rely less on emissions. In addition, those industries have been able over time to reduce their reliance on emissions for production. The study provides evidence that across OECD countries less emission-intensive industries require more highly skilled workers – thus investments in education are critical to better enable the uptake of green technologies.
The main objective of this guidebook is to provide policymakers, workers’ and employers’ organizations and other stakeholders with a practical tool to help them in developing viable policy options to address the many challenges of extending social protection to workers in the informal economy and facilitating transitions to formality.
This report identifies the circular economy baseline, market gaps and opportunities existing in Africa. The research findings highlight five opportunity areas to transition Africa to a circular economy development model based on a set of criteria including circularity potential, economic significance, transformative impact potential and momentum. The thematic areas identified as a result are food systems, packaging, built environment, fashion and textile, and electronics.
The Global Youth Energy Outlook (GYEO) is the first youth-led research project of its kind organized by Student Energy to engage over 40,000 young people ages 18 to 30 and share their perspectives on the energy transition. The research highlights that most young people want their countries to take immediate and drastic climate action. At the same time, public and private sector leaders are called upon to actively create opportunities for young people and meaningfully engage youth in decision-making spaces. Additionally, the report highlights regional differences between young people from developing and emerging economies and those from high-income countries.
The authors of this article combined data collected from various sources to build a data-driven assessment of the number of such online workers (also known as online freelancers) globally. Their headline estimate is that there are 163 million freelancer profiles registered on online labour platforms globally.
The transition to a green economy will create many new jobs around the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa. But will women share in these new jobs, and will the economic transformation help them move into higher-paid, more stable jobs that require more education and skills? This brief presents some insights into the green job opportunities available for women in Sub-Saharan Africa and provides policy recommendations to establish appropriate and enabling policies and programmes to ensure that women get an equitable share of green jobs.
This report highlights the key findings and recommendations from a global online survey organized by Plan International. The survey captures the opinions and experiences of young people on climate change education and their participation in climate policy processes.
The main objective of this document is to provide guidance on how to apply a “Blue Economy lens” to Bank operations. To this end, it aims to: 1. Ensure that the World Bank’s operations around oceanic activities are developed with a view to improving the necessary integration between different economic sectors, both on land and at sea, and avoiding unnecessary impacts on ocean health. 2. Identify means to scale up Blue Economy activities, including through new sources of innovative blue finance. To achieve these goals, two related streams of work are identified: one focused on promoting an integrated approach to the sustainable development of oceanic sectors, and the other focused on increasing blue financing.
This Cedefop CrowdLearn study undertakes a comparative analysis of skill development and workplace learning practices among two major types of online platform work: online freelancing and microwork. It combines information on microworkers drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform with the original CrowdLearn sample of online freelancers surveyed from three major online labour platforms (Fiverr, Upwork, PeoplePerHour).
This white paper sets out reforms to further education, recognising that the UK economy is changing rapidly. The pandemic, Brexit, climate change, the expected growth of jobs requiring STEM education or training had collectively snowballed into a skills shortage in recent years – young people did not have the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed in the current and future economy.
The report provides an overview of social protection instruments for different groups in informal economy and proposes innovative instruments to encourage the “missed middle” of social protection to save and build resilience to future shocks.
This brief explores how adopting circular models can create more job opportunities, especially in the services sector. The note shows that the shift to the circular economy has potential for job creation- activities like waste collection, recycling, repair, and remanufacturing are more labour-intensive and could be important segues to job creation. From a skills perspective, the adoption of circular approaches brings to light the importance of skilling, upskilling and digital skill acquisition. In addition, circular jobs will likely demand multidisciplinary and deep technical/industry skills.
This report investigates how Norwegian aid may contribute to reducing emissions while fighting poverty. Three areas where Norway already has a strong record are clean energy, energy transition, nature-based solutions, and sustainable food systems. In addition to these, three areas where there is potential for cooperation are green taxes, the circular economy and urbanization, and green urban development.
This report explores a “what if” scenario – what if the world took action to harness the full potential of DREs to end energy poverty, setting in motion a green power transition across the energy poor world? It combines qualitative case studies with predictive economic modelling to explore the job creation potential that would flow from a steep and rapid increase in investment in DREs across 63 energy-poor countries in Asia and Africa.
