High-level evaluation

Independent high-level evaluation of the ILO’s strategies and actions under the Youth Employment Action Plan 2020-30

An independent high-level evaluation of the ILO’s strategies and actions under the Youth Employment Action Plan 2020–30, reviewing progress from 2020 to 2024. It assesses relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability and emerging impact, and identifies lessons, good practices and recommendations to strengthen future action on decent work for young people.

What is the objective of the Youth Employment Action Plan for 2020-30?

The ILO’s Youth Employment Action Plan for 2020-30 (YEAP) promotes full, productive, and freely chosen employment and decent work for all young people aspiring to work, and to achieve equality, including gender equality through a transformative, human-centred approach.

The YEAP realigns youth employment promotion with a development framework that places young people at the centre of economic, environmental, and social policy. Its approach aims to foster effective measures to support young people through the transitions they will face throughout their working lives and promote their participation in shaping future labour markets through social dialogue.

The YEAP is guided by a strategic framework centred around the five policy areas

Strengthening labour market policies to promote youth employment through active measures, employment programs, social protection measures including for jobseekers, and strategies that ease transitions to formal work, with a focus on rural youth and coordinated efforts involving social partners.
Adopting a rights-based approach to youth employment by ensuring equal treatment, enforcing labour laws, protecting young workers’ rights, and promoting fair wages and occupational safety. Efforts include social protection, targeted wage policies, and early education on workers’ rights to facilitate transitions into decent and stable employment.

Why evaluate?

In November 2024, the ILO Governing Body mandated an independent high-level evaluation of the ILO’s strategies and actions under the YEAP 2020 – 2030 for the period 2020-24. The evaluation is designed generate insights into organizational-level performance within the context of the ILO’s results-based management system.

Purpose and description of the evaluation

The overarching purpose of the high-level evaluation is to provide insights into the ILO’s strategies and actions under the YEAP for 2020-24. It also aims to provide forward looking considerations, findings, lessons learned, and emerging good practices to support improved decision-making for the remaining duration of the YEAP and within the context of the next ILO Strategic Framework.

The evaluation paid particular attention to the YEAP's five policy areas:

Employment and economic policies for youth employment
Labour market policies
Employability (education, training and skills, and the school-to-work transitions)
Youth entrepreneurship and self-employment
Rights for young people.

The evaluation followed EVAL’s high-level evaluation protocol for strategy and policy evaluations. The HLE applied an outcomebased evaluation approach to assess the relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, likelihood of impact, and sustainability of the ILO’s strategies and actions on youth employment.

This approach was guided by a high-level framework that outlined required actions to achieve intended outcomes. The evaluation employed a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative data from various sources:

Comprehensive review of ILO documentation

10 case studies:

• 4 in-depth country-based (Colombia, the Philippines, Tunisia, and Kenya);

• 4 desk-based (Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Youth Guarantee Scheme in the Western Balkans); and

• 2 thematic (balance between demand-side and supply-side approaches, and ILO’s Partnerships on Youth Employment)

170 interviews (46% men and 54% women)

3 surveys with ILO staff, constituents, donors, United Nations and other partners

Synthesis review of 30 evaluation reports on youth employment

Key findings

The evaluation led to multiple findings for decision-making, accountability and organizational learning. Some key findings are listed below:

The ILO has contributed to addressing constituents’ priorities through stronger integration of youth employment into national policy frameworks since 2020. Strengthening youth participation in national decision-making and expanding efforts in underdeveloped areas of the ILO’s programming for youth employment are important avenues to advance the relevance of the ILO’s youth employment agenda.

The ILO has proactively seized opportunities to adapt youth employment strategies to global and national challenges —from COVID-19 and demographic shifts to geopolitical instability, climate change, and digitalization.
The YEAP 2020–2030 outlines a strategic approach that underscores the ILO’s normative and technical leadership in youth employment. However, the absence in the YEAP of an operational implementation mechanism prohibits its potential to function as a unified, actionable framework rooted in internal policy coherence.

The introduction of Output 3.5 in the P&B for 2024–25 marks progress towards institutionalizing youth employment, but continued fragmentation across multiple P&B outputs weakens synergies, and accountability. Only 9% of planned youth employment results for the biennium align with Output 3.5, limiting the reporting on and visibility of results.
The YEAP has driven results at country level, particularly in policy integration, skills development, entrepreneurship and self-employment. Yet, overall effectiveness is constrained by gaps in demand-side interventions, fragmented programming, short-funding cycles, market-related barriers, limited youth involvement in social dialogue, and socioeconomic and political factors.

Work under the YEAP promotes tripartism and social dialogue and reinforces ILO’s normative mandate by advancing rights at work through inclusive policy development at national and sub-national levels, anchored in international labour standards. Enabling rights, such as freedom of association, and collective bargaining are not consistently included in youth-focused strategies.
Since 2020, the ILO estimated total resource expenditure reached USD 445.8 million4 on youth employment—22 per cent of its total expenditure—showing a 61 per cent increase in 2024 compared to 2020 levels, signalling stronger funding partners’ commitment and a high fund utilization rate of nearly 80%. Evolving donor priorities — favouring niche themes like green transitions, digitalization, platform work, and crisis response— present opportunities for the ILO to effectively position youth employment as a priority within a variety of forward-looking agendas.

Despite clear commitment, the ILO’s delivery model for youth employment do not match the ambitions of the YEAP. Persistent staffing shortages with limited-term appointments, absence of formalized roles, and gaps in coordination between headquarters, regional, and country offices affect efforts towards youth employment outcomes. During the review period, over 95% of youth employment expenditure relied on Extra-Budgetary Development Cooperation (XBDC), with achievement of youth employment outcomes reliant on fragmented and time-bound initiatives.

In the absence of a results framework, efforts to monitor progress under the YEAP have remained limited and largely ad hoc.
Integrated solutions and local buy-in demonstrate potential for impact and sustainability in several countries. However, the majority of ILO's youth employment work relies on technical assistance, with limited scale, and challenged uptake of results through integration into national frameworks with sustained domestic financing. These factors undermine sustainability, while limited focus on demand-side solutions and weak private sector engagement in job creation and talent retention reduce likelihood of impact.

Absence of robust monitoring frameworks severely hinders the assessment of the impact and scalability of interventions.

"Working with the ILO is beneficial, rewarding, and encouraging. The ILO should monitor the results of its projects, some of which need more time to achieve more tangible results.” - Constituent

Lessons learned

The absence of a measurable integrated results framework and costed resourcing plan has limited the YEAP’s strategic utility, leading to fragmented actions across the ILO. The Interdepartmental Youth Employment Action Group plays a convening role but lacks the mandate to drive interdisciplinary work across departments and regions.
Youth employment efforts remain largely supply-side focused. Without strengthened demand-side measures—such as support to job creation, private sector engagement, and macroeconomic strategies—initiatives risk falling short of sustainable, long-term impact. Models like the Youth Guarantee show promise but will need significant adaptation outside the EU context.
The Youth Employment Strategy, developed with the African Union, provides the potential to promote and implement coherent national-level youth employment measures across Africa. Emerging opportunities exist for funding partnerships with governments of upper middle-income countries. Constituent demand is also rising in these contexts for digital and green skills. However, nurturing partnerships require dedicated strategies and human resources.

Key recommendations

To sustain its leadership role, the ILO should balance supply-side measures with a sharper focus on the active promotion of youth employment creation through targeted, demand-side interventions. This can be achieved through strengthening its work on cross-ministerial and comprehensive policy frameworks, based on social dialogue and youth engagement, and through the concrete application of newly developed tools.
For cohesive management and full realization of the YEAP results, the Youth Employment Unit should be authoritatively mandated to coordinate youth employment activities across the ILO and optimize resource utilization. To maximize delivery, the overlap between the Output 3.5 coordination team and Interdepartmental Youth Employment Action Group should be addressed. To strengthen field delivery, results from the workforce gap analysis should be considered to address capacity needs in emerging areas in the field.
The ILO should complement the YEAP with an integrated results framework to forge greater institutional programming and strengthen results-based planning, monitoring and reporting.
To strengthen sustainability and impact, the ILO should explore avenues to leverage financial resources with its national constituents, enhance private sector engagement for job creation and talent retention, promote decent work and labour rights, and engage regional and global development banks to integrate the decent work agenda for youth into their financing instruments and technical assistance programmes. The ILO should continue maximizing global partnership platforms by prioritizing the development of value propositions, adopting a unified and tailored engagement approach, and assigning dedicated partnership staff across country, regional, and HQ levels.s.

“The ILO has a critical mandate to work with government and look for different ways to activate the labour market and increase youth employment.” - ILO Partner