The Private Sector and Youth Skills and Employment Programs in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

Getting youth into productive employment
 is an urgent policy issue for countries around the world.
 Many governments in low and middle-income countries are
 actively engaged in policies to help youth attain the skills
 they need to do well in work and in life, as well as to find
 suitable employment. The involvement of the private sector
 in youth skills development and employment is a complex
 issue because the nature of the firms and their motivations
 vary significantly. Multinational corporations operating in
 low and middle-income countries may be motivated by direct
 productivity or profit objectives - to secure a skilled
 workforce, or reliable suppliers - but also, or even
 primarily, by corporate social responsibility (CSR) factors.
 Firms that supply training or employment services will be
 driven by profit considerations when entering these markets
 and deciding what services to offer and to whom. The purpose
 of this paper is threefold: (1) to provide a comprehensive
 look at the way the private sector is involved in youth
 skills and employment in low- and middle-income countries,
 considering the broad range of program types and firm types;
 (2) to present and interpret the available evidence of the
 effectiveness of this involvement; and (3) to understand
 where the private sector has been most effective at
 promoting young people’s labor market success, and what can
 be done to enhance the role of the private sector to achieve
 this objective. The report is organized as follows: chapter
 one gives introduction. Chapter two provides background to
 the analysis of the private sector role in youth employment
 in low- and middle-income countries. In chapter three the
 authors characterize the private sector’s role more
 systematically using the youth employment inventory, a
 global database of interventions that are designed to
 integrate young people into the labor market. Chapter four
 reviews the evidence of effectiveness of youth interventions
 involving the private sector. Chapter five briefly draws
 together strands from the previous review, as well as from
 the broader literature, to gain an understanding of the
 institutional and other factors leading to (and in other
 cases preventing) successful public-private partnerships for
 youth employment. Chapter six summarizes the main findings
 of this review, and is followed by a discussion of key gaps
 in knowledge on the role of the private sector in different
 types of youth employment intervention that future research
 should attempt to address, and a review of the main lessons
 for policy and programming emerging from the study.