Youth, Work, Mobiles and Poverty: everything you need to know
Across the world, kids are our future. They are also unemployed, under-resourced, and working hard to put things right
If you are interested in youth workforce development, and the empowering opportunities of mobile, I'd encourage you to look at the brand new Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review. It's a meaty read, but contains an excellent summary of most of the current, significant initiatives in mobile development, targeting youth employment across the globe
To quote from their overview:
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 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, we?ve launched the mEducation Alliance?sMobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review, an effort supported by 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?
If that isn't enough, there is a thorough annexe at the end, listing 80 initiatives and over 275 publicly available documents that have fed into this review
Well worth a read. You can get the review here: http://www.meducationalliance.org/sites/default/files/mywd_landscape_review_final2013.pdf
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