Results Measurement in Youth Employment

In response to the urgent need of finding employment for a large number of youth, developing countries as well as public and private donors are investing considerable amounts of resources in youth employment programs. Nevertheless, too little is known about what works.

An analysis of the Youth Employment Inventory reveals that there is a severe lack of rigorous evaluation of youth employment interventions leading to a gap in the evidence base to support effective program design and implementation. The analysis of the inventory suggests only 15% youth employment programs from developing countries provide evidence of net impact.

Only rigorous monitoring and evaluation will provide the knowledge base required by policy makers and development practitioners to allow them to assess the effectiveness of programs and to make the right choices in program design and delivery.

In an effort to support the youth employment community to improve the effectiveness of their programs, YEN initiated work on results measurement in August 2008. YEN employs an interative approach of LEARNING, APPLYING, SHARING, in an attempt to cover the entire value chain of the evaluation:

1) LEARNING: Building the capacity of practitioners and policy makers to evaluate their programmes, delivered through YEN Evaluation Clinics.
2) APPLYING: financing a series of evaluations which contribute to the evidence base, delivered through The Fund for Evaluation on Youth Employment.
3) SHARING: dissemination tools to share experiences and good practices on impact evaluation and report on recommendations of impact evaluations.

Results of the Results Measurement Agenda are expected to feedback into overall policy design and implementation of national level youth employment initiatives through YEN's Lead Country Network as well as strengthening the depth of baseline and primary data. All initiatives and data collected will be added and analyzed to the Global Youth Employment Inventory (an initiative of YEN, GTZ and the World Bank).