Youth Employment Programs - Independent Evaluation Group

(MBA) institutes to ensure these institutes meet the needs of the market (IEG2011b).Chile has been experimenting with the certification of training programswithin the Bank-supported Chilecalifica. The program has a positive impact,but the evaluation may overestimate the program’s success due to sampleselection bias. The role of skills certification in addressing informationconstraints is difficult to disentangle from the effects of other employmentservices.IFC has not worked on developing skill certification systems.Remedial, Non-Formal Vocational TrainingNon-formal, short-term skills training has a mixed effect around the world,with women often faring better than men. Latin America has several shorttraining programs, which form part of ALMPs, and are not a part of theformal education system. These courses provide basic job readiness skills toincrease the employability of disadvantaged youth. The Mexican Probecatoffers short-term, on-the-job training complemented by internships in theprivate sector. Honduras and El Salvador have introduced similar programs.The Chile Joven program for at-risk youth has been replicated throughoutLatin America. The Bank supports several of these programs.Skill training for women leads to higher employment rates, better earnings,and shorter cost recovery times. The Procajoven project in Panama has anInsertion Modality for low-income jobless youth with 270 hours of classroomtraining on job readiness and technical training, followed by 172 hourinternshipin a firm. The Transition Modality for secondary school graduate,first-time job seekers offers 120 hours in job readiness training and 344hours in firm internships. Competitive public bidding led to the selectionof training institutes, which had to submit letters from firms providinginternships to ensure the market-relevance of courses. An evaluation findsno significant impact on the employment rate and monthly earnings of allparticipants, but significantly higher employment and earning impacts foryoung women. Participants of the Transition Modality are significantly morelikely to find employment than those from the Insertion Modality program.The cost of training was recovered within a year for all participants andwithin only 3 months for women in the Transition Modality (Ibarraran andRosas 2007).About one-third of the Bank projects included in this portfolio reviewprovide short courses in skill building to unemployed youth or disadvantagedgroups, but little is known about the employment effect. In Turkey, theBank supported 387 skills training (employability training) subprojects thattrained 12,453 unemployed youth in public training centers. In 2006, about12 percent of trainees dropped out, and about 43 percent of graduates wereplaced in jobs or started a business. However, no medium-term information isavailable. In Indonesia, private sector providers in the Life Skills EducationAppendix F: Lessons from Impact Evaluations and World Bank Group Operations 155