What works in Youth Employment?

Partner: Youth Employment Network (YEN)

Duration 2010 – 2012

Status: ongoing

Location: Africa

Over the next decade, one billion young people will enter the global labour market, the largest age cohort ever to reach employment age. They are the next generation of workers, entrepreneurs and leaders.

Globally, youth make up 25 per cent of the world’s working age population with 90 per cent of them living in developing countries. The youth unemployment rate is nearly three times higher than the adult unemployment rate. For those youth who have been able to find jobs, half of them are considered working poor, earning less than USD 2 per day.

YEN is a partnership of the UN, ILO and the World Bank set up after the Millennium Summit in 2001 to find new and durable solutions to the youth employment challenge. The network is a global platform whose goal is to prioritize youth employment on the development agenda and to exchange knowledge on effective policies and programs to improve employment opportunities for youth. It is a service provider focusing on policy advice, innovative pilot projects, knowledge sharing, and brokering partnerships. YEN makes use of its core agency partners know how and resources and ensures youth participation in delivering its services.

YEN advises with a network of policymakers from countries across the globe who have committed to prioritizing youth employment on national policy agendas; its evaluation clinics provide technical and financial support to policymakers and practitioners; it innovated the Youth-to-Youth fund which makes an offer to youth-led organizations to contribute to employment generation and it offers partnerships in order to exchange information, ideas and best practices.

Call For Proposals - YEN’s Fund for Evaluation in Youth Employment

Topic : Youth Entrepreneurship                       Deadline: September 7, 2010

Interested parties are asked to submit a proposal to receive technical and financial support for conducting an impact evaluation of a youth entrepreneurship project.  To be eligible to receive support, please fill out the attached application form and submit it to yenetwork(at)ilo.org by September 7, 2010. The “concept paper” should be read in parallel when filling in the application form.

The Fund, which will operate for 5 years (2010-2015), will commission a series of impact evaluations in youth employment asking qualified applicants to conduct experimental evaluation, ie through the identification of a appropriate control group. The Fund receives financial support from the Jacobs Foundation and the Danish Africa Commission.

Eligibility: Eligible organizations include any NGO, government, multilateral organization, research firm or academic institute in Sub-Saharan Africa. The working language will be English.  In this first call for proposals, only projects whose objectives involve creating self employment opportunities, developing entrepreneurial and self employment skills and competences, and improving access to finance will be eligible. Partnerships between youth employment project teams and research institutions are strongly encouraged.

Selection: Grant recipients will go through a two stage selection process:

1. Stage 1 Shortlist Application: Interested applicants will be asked to submit brief application forms which will provide short details about the project and the scheduled evaluation. The taskforce will shortlist qualified applicants and they will be invited to participate in the next YEN Evaluation Clinic.
2. Stage 2 Evaluation Plans: Clinics will serve as a platform for taskforce members to work with evaluation teams to refine and improve their evaluation plans. Within two months after participation in the Clinic, evaluation teams will submit detailed concept notes on the evaluation and cost-benefit analysis plans. The taskforce will reconvene to review and rate the evaluation plan and give final grant approval for those proposals deemed ready for evaluation.

For further information on the expected methodological rigour of the impact evaluation, see the Annex of the Concept paper.

Questions should be directed at yenetwork(at)ilo.org

Interested applicants can receive further information on the Fund including resources to help you fill out the application by registering at http://yenclinic.groupsite.com