Climbing the Jobs Summit: Scaling Up for Economic Empowerment

Key Highlights

• Over the last five years, more than 77 million beneficiaries have been reached in World Bank jobs-focused interventions.
• Since 2019, the Supporting Effective Jobs Lending at Scale (SEJLS) program, which aims to enhance technical standards and operational capacity to ensure consistent, systematic, targeted approaches to measure job outcomes, has provided guidance, data and country level analysis for 15 lending operations with financial support of $2.25 million.
• In Bangladesh, funding has helped to empower economic zones and software technology parks, generating nearly 45,000 jobs, including 16% women.
• In Ethiopia, the program has financed an agricultural project that has created nearly 1 million jobs for rural people, including 396,000 jobs for women and 505,000 jobs for youth in fragile and conflict affected areas.
• More than 22,000 people benefited from training in tourism or related sectors in Madagascar, and the project created more than 10,000 formal jobs in the tourism and agribusiness sectors in the target regions in 2023.

Challenge

​​Labor markets are going through an unprecedented crisis. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, labor markets have worsened rapidly, with 108 million workers falling into extreme or moderate poverty during the first two years of the outbreak. Even before the pandemic, however, the jobs challenge in developing countries showed alarming trends: more than 250 million youths were neither in training, working, nor seeking work, only one-third of the working-age population in developing countries had access to formal waged jobs, and gender differences across a range of job-related outcomes were substantial. Putting jobs at the heart of development can facilitate access to more and better jobs, reduce the labor market gap (especially the gender gap), unlock youth’s potential, and boost economic prosperity. However, what cannot be measured, cannot be improved. Despite financial support, there is still one piece missing: data.  To measure the effectiveness of job policies, solid jobs outcomes indicators are needed that can provide information to strengthen ongoing and future programs.

Approach

Building the pathway toward ending poverty and sharing prosperity on a livable planet cannot be achieved without placing jobs at the core of development. Since 2019, the World Bank has reached ​more than 77 million people through jobs-focused interventions. Aligned with the World Bank’s twin goals the Jobs Group has developed a multifaced agenda to tackle job-related challenges while championing sustainable and inclusive growth. Over the past seven years, nearly 30 diagnostic projects have been undertaken in developing countries -primarily in Africa, Latin America, and Asia- to provide analytical support for the design of policies to create more and better jobs.

Results

Through SEJLS, the World Bank has supported governments and other organizations in designing and implementing job policies, mainly focusing on measuring direct and indirect job creation as an indicator of growth. Examples from a range of client countries demonstrate the breadth and impact of this support.

In Madagascar, the World Bank has helped to maximize the Second Integrated Growth Poles and Corridor project to contribute to the sustainable growth of the tourism and agribusiness sectors by enhancing access to enabling infrastructure and services in target regions. To improve the project’s impact on jobs, SEJLS ensures technical assistance to refine the measurement of job creation and job quality results by providing recommendations and capacity building during the implementation phase. More than 22,000 people benefited from training in tourism or related sectors, and the project created more than 10,000 formal jobs in the tourism and agribusiness sectors in target regions.

In Bangladesh, the program has helped focus on the job impact of the Private Investment and Digital Entrepreneurship Project, which seeks to promote private investment, job creation, and environmental sustainability in participating economic zones and software technology parks. According to the economic assessment developed by SEJLS, the actual investments are generating nearly 45,000 jobs. The SEJLS’ grant also supported the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework for monitoring economic impacts of the economic zones, based on the project’s results framework and on the analysis that identified constraints to better ensure skills matching and jobs outcomes.

In Ethiopia, the program financed the Second Agricultural Growth Project, a multifaceted agricultural program contributing to economic growth and transformation. Given the challenges the country faces in terms of finding sufficient employment for its expanding labor force, in-depth investigations into the potential of this project to create jobs, particularly for youth and women, are crucial to identify potential avenues for job creation in the country. The findings indicate that the project significantly boosted employment in the agricultural sector, generating close to 1 million jobs for rural populations. This includes diverse opportunities for women and youth, ranging across permanent, seasonal, and temporary positions. Among the permanent jobs generated, a larger share comes in low skilled and part time employment. Specifically, the second Agricultural Growth Project, contributed the creation of 396,000 jobs for women and 505,000 jobs for youth.

World Bank Group Contribution

SEJLS is financially supported by the Jobs Umbrella Multi-donor Trust Fund, a program that has financed more than 140 grants in 40 developing countries and provided millions in investment contributed by the governments of Austria, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Through the program, the World Bank is providing client countries not only with financial assistance, but also with lending and technical support to improve the measurement of jobs creation and quality results, and capacity building to enable effective implementation.

Partnerships

Each jobs-focused project engages with a range of stakeholders to build capacity and tailor interventions to the relevant context. In the three projects discussed above, the World Bank worked with the Ministry of Agriculture of Ethiopia, the Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority, the Bangladesh Economic Zones, the Economic Relations Divisions of Bangladesh, and the National Project Secretariat of Madagascar to increase access to labor market and boost workers’ and firms’ capacity.

Looking Ahead

​​​The Jobs Group is committed to providing operational and technical support in the World Bank’s operations to address the unpostponable job crisis of creating more and better jobs, unlocking youth and women's potential, supporting firms’ development, and boosting productivity. Moving forward, the Jobs Group is working on scaling up SEJLS at country-level engagement by designing holistic and rigorous job policy approaches. This includes working closely with government agencies to understand better how their job policy works, considering cultural and socio-economic patterns, and how such programs can be improved to reduce the gap in today’s labor market.