Work skills for life: a work readiness programme to prepare the transition from secondary school

Youth unemployment is a serious concern in many high-, middle- and low-income countries. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 12.6 million young people will enter the workforce in the next four years in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, many of whom are not expected to find proper employment. Combined with the demographic trends of an increasingly young population, there is reason to expect the problem of youth unemployment to exacerbate in the years to come. A young population also constitutes a tremendous resource and the opportunity to reap a demographic dividend if the problem of unemployment and lack of jobs is addressed. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania, nearly two-thirds of the population are below 25 years. Unemployment among school leavers has been linked to another first-order concern, inadequate job readiness skills; that is, the low quality of education and the inability of schooling to prepare students for the labour market. We propose to investigate whether it is possible to improve the transition from school to the labor market through a specially designed program. To this end, we have will trained official teachers to deliver weekly training modules to young adolescents during the last school year before graduating from lower secondary school. The program was introduced to about 1,400 students, a few months before they leave school. We are now following these youth (and a random comparable group of youth who did not receive the program) throughout their transition to the labour market. An important innovation in our approach lies in the combination of training and supporting teachers, while simultaneously providing them with new teaching material designed to improve the transition to the labor market.

Youth unemployment is a serious concern in many high-, middle- and low-income countries. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 12.6 million young people will enter the workforce in the next four years in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, many of whom are not expected to find proper employment. Combined with the demographic trends of an increasingly young population, there is reason to expect the problem of youth unemployment to exacerbate in the years to come. A young population also constitutes a tremendous resource and the opportunity to reap a demographic dividend if the problem of unemployment and lack of jobs is addressed. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania, nearly two-thirds of the population are below 25 years. Unemployment among school leavers has been linked to another first-order concern, inadequate job readiness skills; that is, the low quality of education and the inability of schooling to prepare students for the labour market. We propose to investigate whether it is possible to increase youth (self-)employment by improving adolescent school leavers’ work readiness through a specially designed work readiness program. To this end, we will train official teachers to deliver weekly work training modules to young adolescents during the last school year before graduating from lower secondary school. An important innovation in our approach lies in the combination of training and supporting teachers, while simultaneously providing them with new teaching material designed to improve work readiness. We will also contribute to the growing literature on the effectiveness of role model based programs as a means to reduce poverty. Whereas existing aspirational edutainment programs have been tested in isolation from other programs, we will consider the extent to which such programs are able to amplify the effects of a work readiness program targeted at a specific group of people, namely school leaving adolescents.