Gender-Sensitive Training and Employer Incentives to Improve Women’s Labour Market Outcomes

Despite improvements in closing the gender educational gaps, youth employment and progression from education to livelihood opportunities remain disappointing in Kenya, particularly for young women. This is due, at least in part, to a lack of training tailored to meet the needs of young women and match the local labour market demands, and other inadequacies in current Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) offerings. Livelihood skills training has emerged as a key approach to supporting young women in the labour market. Such programs provide a second chance to vulnerable young women and men who face a variety of poverty-related challenges, all of which have been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. While TVET institutions are positioned as central to addressing social inequalities and high levels of poverty and youth unemployment, most TVET programs in Kenya do not consider gendered needs, preferences, and constraints to ensure that women benefit from the training as much as men do. As well, existing TVET training is mostly aimed at addressing specific skill deficiencies and does little to address broader labour market constraints that the youth face in their quest for decent employment opportunities, which is particularly important in the current pandemic.

This project aims to evaluate the effectiveness of measures to support young women transitioning from school to work and provide recommendations to address the barriers they face. Using a combination of a randomized control trial and qualitative research, the project will provide evidence on which measures, or the combination thereof, are most effective and can be implemented at scale to support young Kenyan women. The study findings will offer valuable input in the COVID recovery and response, informing the design and implementation of employment policies and skills trainings so that young people, especially women, benefit from better employability, employment quality and opportunities.

This is a collaborative project between the Partnership for Economic Policy, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and CAP Youth Empowerment Institute. The project is supported under the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) East Africa initiative, jointly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. GrOW East Africa seeks to spur transformative change to advance gender equality in the world of work.