Local Youth Employment and Inclusion in Argentina: A Public-Private Initiative for the Development of Talents, Social Cohesion and Inclusion

Abstract

The Youth with a Future (YF) Program is part of the initiative for decent work promoted by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MLES Rocha and Miles, 2008).The capacity to create mechanisms for overcoming poverty and social exclusion is also a new contribution. The creation of these mechanisms is based on building bridges between society’s dynamic economic sectors and its excluded, vulnerable segments. Deactivating customary individual and organizational barriers between those social universes enables a transmission of the formal corporate context’s work-related values to those more unprotected sectors, simultaneously managing to add a social perspective to the economic vision of corporate strategies of employability. The program thus fits in with the emerging tendency towards aligning human motivations, goals of public-private organizations, and social needs (Rocha, 2006a; 2008).To date, after four years of implementation, the results of the programme are promising: 68% of the participants hold quality employment, a percentage that is 48% higher than in the comparison group (youth with secondary school diplomas and from the same geographic area, but who did not participated in the program); and the participants have an average monthly income that is 2.7 times higher than that earned by employed youth without secondary school diplomas who reside in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, and 1.7 times higher than that of those of the same urban area who have finished secondary school.