Youth make up 17 percent of the world’s population and 40 percent of the world’s unemployed, according to the International Labor Organization. A number of factors combine to make sustainable, decent employment an enormous challenge for youth the world over, including low levels of education and technical skills, slow job growth, lack of information about available jobs, and difficulties accessing financial capital to start small enterprises. Decent jobs are especially difficult to find for rural youth, girls and women, and youth with disabilities.

In addition to the growth in youth unemployment, access to and use of mobile technologies (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, eReaders, radio, portable media players, SD cards) among youth worldwide is also expanding. This has created excitement about the potential of mobile devices to catalyze new approaches that address some of the constraints keeping youth from finding and sustaining decent livelihoods. Documentation and evidence of impact in the broad field of mobile technology and youth workforce development (mYWD) is lacking, however, meaning that it has been difficult to identify where mobile technology and youth workforce development initiatives overlap and where mobile may have the greatest added value.

After a year of hard work, last week we launched the mEducation Alliance’s Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review, an effort of the mEducation Alliance, The MasterCard Foundation, and USAID. The review maps out who is doing what and where, and to the extent possible, discusses evidence of what is working. The body of the report answers questions such as:

• What organizations and programs are using mobiles to help overcome the barriers to employment for youth?
• What type of programming has been implemented and how?
• Where do prime opportunities exist for integrating mobile devices into youth workforce development programs?
• What are relevant considerations related to gender and disability in mYWD programming?
• What factors facilitate or hinder mYWD in specific contexts?
• Are there any research findings that show the impact of mobiles on youth workforce development?

In addition, the annexes provide information on 80 initiatives and over 275 publicly available documents describing efforts that use mobile technology to support youth workforce development programming in five key areas:

• Workforce education and training, including basic education, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), job skills training, apprenticeships, and life skills training (in and out of the classroom).
• Employment services, including on-going job referral services that bring employers and workers together through job postings, job fairs, job shadowing, job placement, resume preparation, and coaching.
• Entrepreneurship and enterprise development, including support programs for self-employment and business development, such as entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and financial services for loans and capital.
• Demand-side policies and programs, including broad-based economic growth programs like national youth employment policies, value chain development, public works programs, wage subsidies, minimum wages, and tax breaks for employers (JBS International, 2013).
• Addressing social norms, including programs that support effective participation of excluded groups, non-traditional skills training, safe training and employment spaces for excluded youth, and broader awareness campaigns.

There is an enormous amount of activity in mYWD, from small-scale, market-based start-up applications to mobile innovation hubs for youth entrepreneurs. The landscape review offers a summary of how mobile devices are used in the above five areas, draws out relevant lessons from the available literature and existing evidence base, offers advice from practitioners working in the field of mYWD, discusses the issue of scale and sustainability of mYWD programs, and offers a number of recommendations for furthering the field, including:

• Creating a mYWD framework to aid in advancing the field
• Further developing the evidence base for mYWD
• Improving our understanding of what scale means
• Focusing on gender and youth with disability
• Improving knowledge sharing and collaboration
• Building the mYWD evidence base through research and impact evaluation

Download the mYWD landscape review at this link!

If the topic is of interest, you can also join the mYWD working group by signing up here.

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