Youth Employment Programs - Independent Evaluation Group

people separately from the situation of the broader working-age population.Indeed, and this will clearly be of greater concern in some countries than others.Between 2010 and 2025, the population of people between 15 and 34 willincrease globally, but the vast majority (about 95 percent) of the increase willoccur in sub-Saharan Africa; China will see a large decline in its populationof young people. The need to monitor outcomes separately by age group willbe a function of the circumstances and demands of each country. The WorldBank has a responsibility to provide assistance in monitoring youth outcomesin response to specific requests and where youth employment is considereda significant problem or where youth are explicitly targeted by programs.However, as the report notes, few countries have data with sufficient detailto permit disaggregation by age groups, or sufficient frequency to look atshort-run changes in labor market outcomes. In these cases countries andBank teams should be encouraged to look at international sources of monitoringdata such as the International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) Key Indicatorsof the Labor Market (KILM).Collaboration across sectors. The Bank agrees with IEG that to better assistclient countries with the most effective interventions to address theconstraints facing young people in their entry to the labor market, whetherfrom the demand or supply side, will require greater cross-sectoral collaborationwithin the whole World Bank Group, as well as with other partners anddonors. Successful transition to work often requires that young people masterand integrate a broad set of competencies that are conventionally the domainof different sectors within the World Bank Group, such as basic and technicalvocational skills. In many areas the World Bank Group is already engagedacross sectors, for instance across Social Protection and Education in skillsdevelopment and measurement, across Social Protection, the ConsultativeGroup to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) and Financial and Private Sector Development(FPD) on access to finance and the development of financial literacy,and Social Protection and Poverty Reduction and Economic Management(PREM) on the Adolescent Girls’ Initiative. The Bank also manages the GlobalPartnership for Youth Employment (GPYE) with four external partners 2 as wellas the Youth Employment Inventory (YEI). 3 However, cross-sectoral collaborationshould reflect the goals to be achieved and the constraints identified asbinding on young people’s productive employment. Although a comprehensiveapproach is to be recommended generally, it must be recognized that in somecircumstances a more targeted approach via a focused investment project maybe needed to overcome a particular bottleneck.Future directions for Bank research and operations. Experience accumulatedduring the period under review by this report suggests that some interventionsare more likely than others to bear fruit, depending on contexts andconstraints. For example, the vast majority of interventions on youth employmenthave focused on the supply side, assuming that the binding constraintis that the workers do not have the right skills. This may be true in someregions, but in other regions, other constraints may bind, such as inadequatelabor demand, or problems in the labor market itself, such as overly restric-Management Response xxi