Why do we need a Global Coalition for Youth Employment?

It was an honour for me to speak at the launch of The Future of Work for the People we Serve. All my working life, I’ve served young people – the ones at the sharp end of the unemployment crisis:  the ones who study hard, pass their exams – and then find themselves on a human scrap heap.  It’s bad enough in the UK – but in low-income countries, where 80 to 90% have to create their own jobs, it’s intolerable. One young Indian told me: “They say: ‘If you can’t find a job – create one!  Start a business!’  But nothing in my 14 years at school has given me one clue how to do this….!”

Liam’s book includes an excellent essay by Alec Ross, who writes: “Policy-makers need to ruthlessly re-orient education…”  Olfa Soukri MP, makes a similar point: “The starting point should be education….” Liam’s book mentions the word ‘education’ over 60 times – quite rightly for an APPG that promotes “Inclusive Growth” as schools are the institutions which, in almost every country, includes everyone.

A century ago, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “My education began the day I left school…” 50-years later, Paul Simon sang: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School…!”  My young Indian friend would agree: today they provide a woefully poor preparation for the world of work. The world is changing so fast, it’s hard for an individual to keep abreast of change in one specialist field – let alone the entire panoply of human knowledge that schools attempt to cover. Already, in the USA, researchers find that young people get 70% of their information from the internet confirming what many young people have told me: that schools are quickly becoming redundant.

DFID, one of the largest donors to the Global Programme on Education, knows this: they are very focused on ‘teaching the basics’ (literacy and numeracy) – but it was their research which found that, in Ghana, after 6 years in a primary school, half the students could not read a line nor count to ten. In spite of this, they are not, sadly, in the business of ‘ruthlessly re-orienting education….”  They should be. One lesson we could teach them is that when a child realizes that their future survival depends on being able to manage money and write a business plan, they quickly become incentivized to learn read and write. This tells us that our kind of entrepreneurship education might be a better way of teaching literacy and numeracy than traditional teaching techniques.

On the supply side, our coalition has hundreds of ideas of how governments can deliver better training to young people preparing to enter the 21^st Century job market. Liam’s book spotlights one of the best of them: Singapore’s SkillsFuture programme which encourages and enables citizens to embrace lifelong learning by giving them ‘Learning Budgets.’ Low income countries are unlikely to have the budgets to afford such programmes, but we have a ton of others:  the School Enterprise Challenge, Self-financing Schools, School Job Clubs, Youth Business Trusts…. hundreds of supply side trainings that can be included in school curricula so that every child benefits. As DFID and others seek to ‘Turbo-charge youth jobs’ by finding evidence for “What Works?” – they should look to coalitions like our’s. For our combined years of experience has taught us a lot about what works and – as importantly – what doesn’t.

The main thing we’ve learned that does NOT work are piecemeal approaches. The CHOGM mandate is right: you have to ‘invest in a systems approach” – creating partnerships between stake-holders, and coordinating every facet of government activity – from education, to labour laws, to investment strategies and private sector regulation – to maximise supply-side employability skills with demand side job-rich growth. In each country, we encourage governments to create their own National Coalitions for Youth Employment (NCYEs), each managed by a Board of stakeholders’ representatives from government, the private sector, donors / investors, academics, experts and NGOs + youth themselves.

Each stakeholder conducts a bench-marking study to –

1. Establish which job-creating technologies are practiced in their country – and –
2. Assess how effective they are;

Each stakeholder group identifies the gaps and drafts a National Action Plan to fill them. Merging their ideas, they create a combined National Action Plan which offers a multi-sectoral, multi-facetted suite of policies to deliver systemic solutions to the unemployment crisis.

It has to start with Education, but we have found that Education Ministries, and teachers themselves, are often the most resistant to “ruthless re-orientation…”  That’s why the “C” in our acronym also means “Campaign”: for we face a huge advocacy job to make our schools and vocational training establishments fit for purpose in the 21^st Century – especially in Low-Income countries. Promoting youth agency is one way that has proved effective: groups as various as Child-to-Child and Each-one-teach-one to Peace Child International’s own Pyramid Peer Education and Peer Mentoring schemes deliver great results and, because the youth delivering them work for the wages of experience, they have the advantage of being cheap.

Four pillars underpin our Coalition’s strategy for an effective Systems Approach to Youth Job Creation:

• ONE: Partnerships: between all stake-holders that creates synergies between each stake-holders’ strengths;
• TWO: Demand- AND supply-side interventions: training, investment in and mentoring of youth-led businesses must be accompanied by massive increases in inward investment to create the new industries that will provide more decent jobs to the demographic youth bulge that is passing through Low Income countries;
• THREE: Create national coalitions: no one size fits all but all can learn from the huge compendium of initiatives that have worked in different countries and, from them, tailor a bespoke suite of policy solutions.
• FOUR: Focus on, and engage with, youth: demographics dictate that young people are the majority of those who require jobs, so developing youth agency in youth job and enterprise creation has to be a priority.

Each of the twenty members of our Coalition bring a different set of experiences to that System and – between us – we believe we can help governments – and youth themselves – solve the unemployment crisis that currently faces them.

 David Woollcombe is Founder and Chair of Trustees of Peace Child International – an organisation that has helped 10,000 bottom-of-the-pyramid young women into productive self-employment by through specialist training and mobile phone Apps like Ishango.