Youth Employment Programs - Independent Evaluation Group

eform of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia education and training systemsto support the competitiveness of their economic systems.Skills for the 21 st Century in Latin America and the Caribbean Region (Aedoand Walker 2012) highlights the large achievement gap between the LatinAmerica and Caribbean region and advanced economies and East Asia,which keeps the former region from developing cutting-edge industries. Thereport recommends the need to address problems of quality and relevancein secondary and tertiary education. These recent Bank reports contributeto the discussion about what is needed on a regional level to improve youthemployment.Collaboration in Youth EmploymentThe full extent of cross-sector collaboration in youth employment operationsis not known. Most operations are multisectoral and support someinterventions in skills building, school-to-work transition, and investmentclimate reforms. When Bank teams prepare and implement these operations,they generally include Bank staff, consultants, and government counterparts,who can have different sector expertise. IEG reviewed the ImplementationCompletion Reports of 36 closed projects to identify the number of staff fromdifferent sectors working on a project team. The data in these reports donot identify how long staff from other sectors spent on a team, the sectorspecialty of consultants, or the contribution of government counterparts.Thus, the full extent of cross-sector collaboration in youth employmentprojects is unknown.Institutional structures and lack of incentives to work across sectors canbe addressed. Youth employment issues can benefit from cross-sectoralcollaboration. Discussions with key informants and the results of the surveyof task team leaders suggest that the Bank’s sector organization is perceivedto constrain cross-sector collaboration in multisectoral projects. Credit foran operation goes to the units that officially manage the tasks. Indeed, fewconnections are built across sectors to address youth employment. Crosssectorcollaboration and coordination in both the Bank and the client countryare useful in addressing youth employment in a comprehensive way. In Brazil,for example, matching the Bank team with the client “teams” (representativesfrom different ministries) helped support cross-sector projects and enhancedcoordination within both the Bank and the government.The Bank is participating in international initiatives relevant for youthemployment (boxes C.2 and C.3).In 2008, the Adolescent Girls Initiative (AGI) was created as part of the WorldBank Group’s Gender Action Plan, “Gender Equality as Smart Economics.”It is cofinanced by the NIKE Foundation and the governments of Australia,Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. AGI aims to promote thetransition of adolescent girls from school to productive employment in wage-Appendix C: Strategies and Collaboration 97