Globally, women are underrepresented in online gig work, and results from our upcoming study based on a global survey point to only a quarter of gig workers being women. While there are expectations that online platforms would facilitate access to work for women, the potential of online gig work to support female labor force participation has yet to be fully tapped. In celebration of International Women’s Day, we gather remarkable experts to discuss how the online gig economy can bolster labor opportunities for women and contribute to closing the gender gap.

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Recent estimates predict that the metaverse economy could be worth up to $13 trillion with 5 billion users by 2030.  The metaverse job market is expected to reach an $800 billion valuation by 2024, and 10,000 jobs are estimated to be added to the metaverse market in the next years. Metaverse is trending and many Tech giants – together with fashion and luxury brands – have already invested billions in the new digital space. This webinar brought together specialist from the Metaverse field to discuss how the Metaverse is transforming the world of work, what skills young people should have, and what are the challenges and opportunities for young professional creators. Access to the recording webinar here.

The pandemic has underscored the essential value of healthcare workers in ensuring economic resilience and social development. We can certainly have vivid memories of healthcare workers’ efforts during the pandemic to deliver high-quality service despite their exhaustion. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the global shortage of nurses, and currently, there is an estimated shortage of up to 13 million nurses worldwide. Despite the challenges, crises can be taken as opportunities. This webinar discussed how international organizations, the public, and the private sector can work together to develop initiatives that provide healthcare workers with solid skills to fill the gap in the health labor market. This webinar was organized jointly by the Skills Global Solutions Group.

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The recent pandemic has underscored the essential role health workers play in ensuring a nation's socio-economic resilience. However, there is a growing shortage of health professionals, and around 40 million health jobs need to be created by 2030. At the same time, several countries continue to face the persistent challenge of youth unemployment -64 million unemployed youth and 145 million youth living in poverty.  In this regard, could health workforce shortages offer an opportunity to prepare and employ young people for meaningful work in the health sector? This presents a win-win opportunity for governments, the private sector, and civil society to work together to build more robust health systems while simultaneously creating job opportunities for youth in the health sector. This is an opportunity to invest in human capital, and stronger health systems, by putting youth employment at the core of the global policy agenda.   

This webinar introduces the key findings of the latest S4YE report, “Strengthening the Health Sector while Promoting Jobs for Youth”, that highlighted three sub sectors in health that could especially provide new job opportunities for youth i.e.- digital health, care economy, and non-technical support roles. This webinar especially discusses opportunities in digital health. 

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This webinar discussed how hackathons and innovation challenges help promote youth-led innovations. It presented the example of the Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls and Hack for Earth and provided provide a practical example of a youth-led innovation and winner at Hack for Earth Hackathon in Expo 2020 Dubai: The Luminous Teen. It focused on responding to the following questions:

• How do hackathons and innovation challenges promote youth-led innovations?
• How do these events promote the creation of innovation networks?
• What are the best ways of identifying relevant and sustainable solutions?
• Who should be organizing this type of event? For whom? And what are the steps?

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Energy is at the heart of development and is essential to reducing poverty. Energy makes possible the investments, innovations and new industries that are the engines for economic growth and job creation. Currently, the global energy landscape is witnessing significant transformations, and renewable energies are playing an increasingly vital role in helping countries develop modern, secure energy systems. With this in perspective:

• How will the energy transition re-shape education systems and the skills required to secure energy-efficient jobs?
• What actions do young people want to see happen to deliver a sustainable energy transition?
• How are young women and men innovating to create efficient energy solutions, and how do these innovations promote employment?

This webinar shared the findings from the Global Youth Energy Outlook (GYEO), which is the first youth-led research project to engage over 40,000 young people ages 18 to 30 share their perspectives on the energy transition.

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The digital transformation is creating new job opportunities, especially for women, who are able to work from home and overcome time and mobility constraints. However, digital technologies also bring new risks—one of these is online violence. In addition to psychological harm, this form of violence may undermine the positive jobs effects of the digital transformation by increasing the likelihood that young women forgo or leave digital jobs. This webinar discusse based on the following questions:

• How does online gender-based violence impact women's labour market participation?
• How can youth employment programs that try to connect young women with potential digital jobs opportunities deal with the risk of subjecting women to online violence?
• What are some possible policy responses?
• What is the role of technology companies?
• And how can we create safer online spaces for all?

Technology can help provide youth with tools to make more informed decisions, grow their businesses, and create more jobs. However, the existing digital divide still leaves large populations of vulnerable youth disconnected and unable to access the modern skills and resources they need to find and create productive jobs. Aware of that, Orange, one of the S4YE's partners, has created the Orange Digital Centers, to provide digital and entrepreneurial skills to youth. From coding to business coaching, these centers provide training to students and young jobseekers to help them grow in their careers or start new businesses. In this webinar, Orange shared its experience setting up these Orange Digital Centers in Tunisia, Jordan and Ethiopia,  and how they have helped youth develop new businesses.

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Job matching platforms offer a variety of different services for job seekers, enterprises, and researchers. Beyond their traditional matching function, this type of platforms also collects valuable big data, which is essential for skills and labour market forecasts. However, not everyone is taking advantage of this valuable resource.  This webinar presents the approaches of two youth-led job matching platforms HaHu Jobs in Ethiopia and Huntr in the United Arab Emirates. It intends to address the following questions:

• What can we learn from the data collected through job matching platforms?
• How can job matching platforms support low and medium-skilled workers?

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While the world has experienced a steady increase in bandwidth speed over the last few years, widespread differences between developed and developing economies still exist. To tackle the connectivity challenge, numerous organizations have piloted innovative ways of offering learning, training, mentoring, and soft skills development programmes to the most disadvantaged. Many of these refer to the use of offline technologies that include programmes delivered entirely through SMSs or through low bandwidth usage Apps such as WhatsApp.

This S4YE webinar introduces innovative solutions with the potential of being replicated and implemented at a larger scale in low-bandwidth areas, focusing on the use of text-based solutions for learning.

Webinar recording here!