Pardee Initiative Partners with the World Bank

RAND — through the Pardee Initiative and the Center for Middle East Public Policy — is collaborating with the World Bank to look for solutions to youth unemployment in developing nations.

A Global Coalition for Youth Employment

The Coalition is a major new initiative by the World Bank and other partners to identify and support effective and scalable solutions for youth employment in low and middle income countries. It grows out of a recognition both of the massiveness of the youth unemployment problem—particularly in the MENA and Sub-Saharan African regions—and the fact that, despite the huge amount of resources and programs in existence, the evidence base on which interventions or policies are effective remains thin and scattered.

Coalition partners currently include, in addition to the World Bank and RAND: Accenture, a leading multinational management consulting and technology services firm; Plan International, a major global organization directed at ending child poverty and increasing development; and International Youth Foundation and Youth Business International, two prominent NGOS focused on youth in low and middle income countries.

RAND will play a key intellectual role in the Coalition. In the first phase of the initiative, lasting until fall 2014, RAND took the lead role in designing the approaches to developing the knowledge base, creating the “blueprint” for transferable and scalable interventions, developing strategies for dissemination and policy impact, and setting out the evaluation criteria for funding interventions.