ACWICT is a member of the World Bank’s Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE)’s external community of practice, the Impact Portfolio. As a member of the S4YE Impact Portfolio, ACWICT joins a new community of innovative youth employment projects from around the world. 

Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) is a multi-stakeholder coalition among the public sector, private sector, civil society actors, government officials, foundations, think tanks, and young people that aims to provide leadership and resources for catalytic action to increase the number of young people engaged in productive work. S4YE’s mission is to develop innovative solutions to youth employment, through practical research and active engagement with public and private stakeholders to enable solutions at scale. S4YE combines a pragmatic approach to identifying solutions for youth employment with an evidence-based advocacy platform for increased access to productive work for young people. S4YE has two key priorities: 1) Innovation and 2) Knowledge, Learning, and Communications and three cross-cutting themes: gender, youth participation, and private sector engagement (see framework below).

The initiative is fueled by the need to address a growing challenge: In the next 10 years, more than 1 billion young people will enter the job market. This means that 5 million jobs are needed per month to accommodate this influx and maintain current employment levels in the developing world.