This report assesses Sub-Saharan Africa’s achievements in skills development and weighs those achievements against the challenges the region faces. It argues that policymakers in the region need to make strategic and smart investments in the early years, education and training.  

This toolkit provides systematic guidance for identifying and assessing opportunities and constraints in the tourism ecosystem, as well as identifying potential points of entry for interventions. The toolkit includes information on the tourism diagnostic process, a set of indicators and checklists for conducting secondary research.

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. 

The objective of this study, carried out by the IDB, is to promote and give visibility to one of the sectors of the creative economy with the greatest potential, not only for the entertainment and software industries, but also for others such as health and education. This study will explore how the industry is not only capable of generating wealth, but also of creating more sophisticated jobs as new technologies develop along with the creative sectors. This presentation will highlight the region’s 50 most prominent video game studios, as well as the challenges facing the industry in Latin America. This industry has the potential not only to trigger new future jobs for the younger generations that grew up playing, but also to become an instrument for a new types of learning.

RIWI introduces a leading indicator to anticipate the future of online-facilitated ‘gig’ work globally. The 43-country signal includes a broad range of young people’s experiences, including those not typically included in workforce data. They that most young adults globally do this kind of work because they view it as an opportunity, not because they have no alternatives.

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.

This paper examines the effects of a government-sponsored apprenticeship training program designed to address high levels of youth unemployment in Ghana. The results show that apprenticeships shift youth out of wage work and into self-employment. 

This handbook is written for the operational managers in agribusiness companies responsible for integrating smallholder farmers into value chains as suppliers, clients, or customers.

Fears that robots will take away jobs from people have dominated the discussion over the future of work, but the World Development Report 2019 finds that on balance this appears to be unfounded. Instead, technology is bringing opportunity, paving the way to create new jobs, increase productivity, and improve public service delivery.

Youth Programming Assessment Tool (YPAT) tool helps youth-serving civil society organizations reflect upon their internal programming and institutional practices and identify areas for improvement. The tool sets standards of best practice and provides concrete steps and examples for improving programming.

In partnership with Philippine Department of Education, the World Bank conducted a series of assessments of the Alternative Learning System ( for out-of-school youth and adults). This policy note summarizes the empirical evidence obtained from these assessments and other program data and presents policy options to increase the effectiveness of the such programs.

This is a spreadsheet-based toolkit that allows researchers and practitioners to project the size of formal and informal labor, production, and growth in almost 100 countries yearly until 2040.

This guide provides evidence-based operational principles for teams working on women’s entrepreneurship, including resources to build the business case for supporting women-owned businesses and start-ups; to develop a framework for support programs for women-owned businesses, and to share insights from case studies and results.

This policy brief provides a framework for applying behavioral insights to youth unemployment problems, building on rigorous evidence from across the world. Unemployment and inactivity interacts interdependently with psycho-social wellbeing and competence. Solutions to structural problems can be improved by integrating behavioral solutions.

This report captures the experience of young people in the agrifood system — both those who innovate (innovators) and those they design solutions for (adopters). Instead of looking separately at these groups, the research sees innovators and adopters as part of a larger interconnected landscape, supported by those who contribute to building the enabling environments that help get technologies to communities (promoters). 

The report draws on recent household and enterprise surveys and provides regional comparisons that place the challenges in Burkina Faso in a wider context. It closes with preliminary policy recommendations for a future jobs strategy.

Since 2016, the Balearic Islands Employment Service (SOIB) has been developing a Dual Training Programme focused on the Blue Economy for youth eligible for the Youth Guarantee System. It aims to qualify unemployed youth (aged 16- 29) using apprenticeship contracts in collaboration with local Blue Economy companies and Vocational Education Training (VET) centres in the field of nautical maintenance, engineering, painting and maritime carpentry.

This paper presents the findings of a joint project, conducted by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company, which studied the impact of emerging technologies – artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and blockchain – on the creative economy. The project team conducted more than 50 interviews with experts from Asia, Europe and North America, as well as three workshops in China and the United States with World Economic Forum constituents. Given the varying maturity of the different technologies, it is too early to definitively state how they will change the creative economy. This paper outlines opportunities and concerns for each technology and presents suggestions for where attention could be concentrated if the benefits are to be realized.

Cultural and creative sectors (CCS) constitute a vibrant economic activity and source of jobs, enterprise turnover and tax revenues. However, the role of culture for local development is more than these direct outputs. Smartly managed culture-led urban regeneration can breathe new life into decaying neighbourhoods. CCS also contribute to increasing levels of regional innovation and productivity, through new product design, new production techniques, new business models, innovative ways of reaching audiences and consumers, and emerging forms of co-production. Cross-sectoral “contamination” can spread innovation into the wider economy. Moreover, there is growing evidence that increased levels of cultural participation have positive effects on well-being and health as well as encourage social cohesion by supporting the integration and inclusion of marginalised groups.