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Collaborating for Change

The MasterCard Foundation’s Youth Livelihoods team is fully into conference season. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) meetings, Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and Youth Economic Opportunities (YEO) have resulted in three weeks of keynotes, plenaries, round-tables, working sessions and side meetings.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), small and growing businesses and youth employment have been top of mind for donors, practitioners, governments, businesses, investors and of course young people.  Despite the diversity of venues there are notable and consistent themes to reflect on as we finalize our own preparations for our inaugural Young Africa Works Summit at the end of the month.

Momentum for the SDGs: The design and ratification by more than 190 United Nations (UN) member states of the SDGs has created new momentum and a framework to address critical development challenges. Our work with the Foundation Center and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is an emerging example of how government, the United Nations and philanthropic bodies can better coordinate and track the impact of their work. For our Youth Livelihoods program, SDG 4 (education) and SDG 8 (decent and productive work), will set global benchmarks for our work to align in the years to come.

Talent and skills: Whether it’s identifying, providing and measuring transferable, non-cognitive skills to support the transition to work, or the talent needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the skills gap and demand for trained youth is a pressing issue. The work of Child Trends and FHI360 as well as our own research with 3IE demonstrate the need to improve the provision and understanding of how best to ensure young people have the non-technical skills that prepare them for the labour force.

Eco-systems: The interaction between young people and education and training institutions, training providers, employers, government policy and broader markets make systems level engagement crucial. There’s an increasing commitment to understand how projects and programs can adapt and be embedded within wider market and political systems, rather than parallel interventions. The focus of the keynote address at the Youth Economic Opportunities conference explicitly on scale and market systems recognizes the need to re-frame how youth employment interventions are designed.

Financing: Effectively addressing any of the above themes requires multiple forms of financial investment. Subsidies, impact investing, granting, traditional overseas development assistance (ODA) and private investment need to work together to amplify the available resources to address social issues. Blended finance models are of increasing interest to foundations, governments, businesses and others, further blurring the lines between traditional development assistance and new financing mechanisms to address social issues.

At our upcoming Young Africa Works Summit, I will moderate a panel entitled ‘demand driven skills development’ which will touch on a number of themes—especially the provision of non-cognitive skills for rural youth and the role of technical vocational education and training institutes (TVETs). Identifying the training needs of young people and the private sector, testing and learning from effective models, scaling the ones that work through both government and the private sector and identifying innovative financing mechanisms will be top of mind as we gather together at the Summit this month.

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