Programs Promoting Young Women's Employment

Abstract

The World Bank is launching an initiative aimed at addressing the economic needs of adolescent girls and young women in poor or post-conflict countries. Working together with governments, donors, foundations, and private sector partners, the Bank proposes to develop and test a core set of promising interventions to promote the economic empowerment of adolescent girls and young women. This paper undertakes a review of existing policies and programs designed to promote labor force participation of young women in developing countries. While programs that directly address marriage or fertility can influence young women's labor force participation, the focus of this paper is on programs primarily addressing employment. Some programs for promoting young people's transition into the labor market take a minimalistic approach (for example, concentrating on skills training alone). Other employment programs, particularly those targeted to young women, simultaneously address multiple constraints limiting participation (for example, lack of skills, limited mobility, child care needs, and lack of sexual and reproductive health information). The goal of this paper is to unpack and assess what elements of program design are essential to promoting young women's transition to the labor market. The paper is organized as follows: section one gives introduction. Section two provides an overview of some of the major trends and issues facing young women in the labor market in an international context. Section three describes a selection of best practice programs, some of which are focused exclusively on employment training and others of which take a more integrated approach to providing gender-targeted adolescent services. Section four details the lessons learned from the implementation and evaluation of these programs, and considers the circumstances under which a minimalist versus comprehensive or integrated approach may be most effective. Section five concludes and summarizes the policy and program recommendations.