Closing Event:
“Re-Imagining Youth Economic Opportunity in a Post COVID-19 World"
On Thursday, October 29 from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT, Making Cents International’s YEO Network convened a special closing session of the 2020 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit (GYEO) virtual series.
Joined by the Summit’s global community of international youth-led and youth-serving organizations, funders and policymakers, business voices, researchers, technical experts, and young leaders we reflected on the lessons, challenges, and opportunities on our community by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The multi-format event included video and live sessions that brought together voices from across the youth development community. The agenda included:
Event Details
Date & Time:
Thursday, October 29, 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT
Format:
Four hours, online, advance registration required.
Registration is free and space is limited.
Schedule of Events:
All program sessions and times listed are subject to change and in EDT.
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9:20 a.m. – 9:45 a.m. Generation to Generation Fireside Chat
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9:45 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. Transition Break
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10:20 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Transition Break
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10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Live Breakout Sessions
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11:30 a.m. – 11:35 a.m. Transition Break
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11:35 a.m. – 12:35 p.m. Closing Session: Collective Action for Youth-Centered Development Priorities
Event Schedule
Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:00 a.m. – 9:10 a.m.
Join Making Cents' Director of the YEO Network Sarah Sladen as we kick off the closing event for the 2020 GYEO Summit.
Voices from the Community
9:10 a.m. – 9:20 a.m.
Implementing partners from around the world share, what reimagining youth economic opportunities means to them.
Hear from the following organizations:
Voices from the Community
Generation to Generation Fireside Chat
9:20 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
2020 GYEO Youth Voices Sponsor IREX presents will highlight the importance of youth inclusion through a special Generation to Generation Fireside chat featuring a young leader from Nigeria and Director from Ford Foundation.
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Expert Lightning Talks - What Does the Pandemic Mean for...
9:50 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Experts from fields key to youth economic success share what the pandemic has meant for youth economic inclusion in their respective fields.
Gender and Workforce
Gender and Workforce
Education Technology and Inclusion
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Education Technology and Inclusion
Live Breakout Sessions
10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Take a deep dive into the Summit's technical content with 5 concurrent breakout sessions presented from Summit partners and sponsors.
Youth-led Design-Thinking to Tackle Global Challenges
Chemonics & UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab
How can you use design thinking to tackle the challenges facing youth globally, and to create opportunities in your own community? The UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab, and its Lead Scale Partner Chemonics International, will provide a framework for reimagining economic opportunity by putting youth in the lead. During this session, participants will be coached on design thinking and social impact acceleration to generate solutions that address sustainability challenges. The workshop will be an opportunity for participants to gain insight into the UNLEASH methodology, which gathers 1,000 young innovators annually to collaborate on solutions that address the Sustainable Development Goals. The session will demonstrate how passionate, empowered youth who are equipped with the right tools, resources, and networks can develop and scale innovative business solutions. You will develop problem-solving skills to apply to challenges in your every-day life and in your community.
New Research: Understanding the Impacts of COVID-19 on Youth-Serving Nonprofit and Social Enterprises
D2i & Deloitte
Around the world, communities are feeling the impact of COVID-19. Specifically, nonprofits and social enterprises have experienced technology and funding challenges but remain hopeful for the future of their organizations. We will convene nonprofit leaders from different backgrounds and geographies to illustrate how their organizations have demonstrated resiliency and innovation through the pandemic, and discuss how they are thinking about youth engagement, expansion, and workforce opportunities in the future.
The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Before, During-and Post COVID: An Egyptian Case Study
MTC
The panel will offer insights on recent efforts and programming for the development of youth entrepreneurship in Egypt from a variety of stakeholder perspectives, to include:
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The role of the Egyptian education ministry in support of youth entrepreneurship.
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Factors that contribute and support young entrepreneurs.
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How the entrepreneurial ecosystem and culture are supported by the broader community of development/capacity building organizations.
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How young Egyptian entrepreneurs are being impacted by the corona virus.
Youth Systems – Framework for Putting Systems Thinking into Practice
Save the Children and Collective Change Lab
Have you thought about working on a systems level? Systems change can increase successful and sustainable outcomes by focusing on the least explicit but most powerful conditions for change. This session provides an evidence based, “inverted triangle” framework as an actionable model for stakeholders interested in creating systems change, particularly those who are working to advance positive youth outcomes. Top Takeaways include:
• Shifts in system conditions are more likely to be sustained when working at three different levels of change: explicit, semi-explicit, and implicit.
• Systems change is about advancing equity by shifting the conditions that hold a problem in place.
• To fully embrace systems change, stakeholders should be prepared to see how their own ways of thinking and acting must change as well.
Please joins us for this practical session and get connected to the positive youth development collaborative focusing on youth systems change.
Youth At Work: Scaling Up Youth Workforce Development During COVID-19
MSI, World Learning, The World Bank, USAID, and Rice University
This virtual session will highlight examples of successful policy-level COVID-19 responses, large-scale, or scalable youth employment programs responding to COVID impacts. The breakout will bring together foundations, implementing partners, INGOs, government representatives, the private sector, youth leaders, and donors— those who are working in the youth employment sector—to discuss how youth employment programs are pivoting and adjusting their business models during COVID-19 to access unemployed youth at scale. The evidence regarding what works in scaling up youth programs during COVID-19 is limited, such that experts in our community will need to combine their collective expertise and experiences, along with their current understanding of the evolving pandemic situation, to forge strong and scalable youth employment pathways.
Session Moderators:
Nancy Taggart, Sr. Youth and Workforce Development Advisor, USAID
Catherine Honeyman, Senior Youth Workforce Specialist, World Learning
Closing Session:
Collective Action for Youth-Centered Development Priorities
11:35 a.m. – 12:35 p.m.
A live, interactive closing session titled, “Collective Action for Youth-Centered Development Priorities,” with our community and leading voices from USAID, Citi Foundation, The Youth Employment Funders Group (YEFG), the Alliance for International Youth Development (AIYD), and more to explore how we as a collective system of actors can best support policies advancing youth economic opportunity and development in the changing context of COVID-19.
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Event Close
12:35 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
President of Making Cents, Timothy Nourse will bring us together for a closing to the 2020 GYEO Summit, exploring important learnings from this years Summit and to discuss the future of youth economic opportunities in our sector.
Technical Content
A Review of USAID YouthPower Activities
USAID YouthPower Learning Project
This document presents a review of activities implemented under the USAID YouthPower project. The overall purpose of this review is to generate the lessons learned related to USAID’s application of positive youth development (PYD) approaches over the past five years. It covers 11 activities at the country level, plus lessons learned from select USAID’s global research in PYD and youth engagement efforts. While the majority of activities (6 of the 11) were considered primarily “workforce development” activities, interventions spanned across more than 16 different sectors including education, economic growth, violence prevention, health, and civic participation. More than 215,000 youth were served by the 11 YouthPower activities covered under this review. The total value of the 11 activities was nearly $216 million, with an average project size of roughly $18 million.
This is the new skills gap for young people in the age of COVID-19
IREX
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Faced with rising unemployment, disrupted education and further disadvantages for vulnerable groups, immediate attention is required to prepare young people to earn and thrive during and after the COVID-19 pandemic;
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IREX is calling on policy-makers and educators to transform how we think about learning;
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Teaching young people how to “learn to learn” and learn to discern will help them learn to earn.
With the COVID-19 pandemic causing a projected loss of 195 million jobs, dismaying interruptions to education and a disproportionate impact on vulnerable groups, preparing young people to earn and thrive in a post-COVID world requires immediate attention.
Changing Norms, Shifting Power: Lessons from YouthPower Learning Grants about Gender Transformative Positive Youth Development
USAID YouthPower Learning Project
This brief highlights some of the ways in which positive youth development (PYD) programs are addressing the impacts of gender inequalities and restrictive gender norms on young people. It uses the YouthPower Learning Grants as a diverse sample of initiatives that have revealed insightful lessons about where gender and PYD intersect, and what to do about it.
3 Lessons for Empowering Youth to Drive Sustainable Change Through Innovation
Chemonics
Youth are an indispensable yet underutilized force in tackling global poverty and inequality. Their energy, passion, and courage to challenge the status quo are needed to identify and address complex global problems, and their insights are worthy of attention and investment. The global development community should serve as champions and provide stronger ecosystems of support for those insights to materialize into effective development solutions. Through our projects and partnerships, like the UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab that focuses on enabling social entrepreneurship, we at Chemonics put youth in the driver’s seat so they can decide how to improve their own environments. By equipping them with the skills, resources, and networks they need to solve problems in their communities, and ensuring they are empowered to lead the process, we have seen youth support job creation, contribute to economic growth, and much more.
Youth must become "power learners" to navigate uncertainty and change
IREX
COVID-19 has created an enormous amount of change and uncertainty across the world and ramped up the speed at which economies are becoming digitized and the future of work and learning are shifting — a fourth Industrial Revolution. Young people are being hit hard by this massive wave of change and uncertainty.
These disruptions are transforming the world of work and learning youth are embarking on; moving learning online, limiting access to education, causing significant job losses and shifting work opportunities. To navigate these waves of change and uncertainty, young people must become adaptable “power learners.”
Creating Space for Youth to Thrive: A Philosophy on Youth Development
Chemonics
At Chemonics, we believe in helping youth succeed by putting them in the driver’s seat to improve the structures around them. We believe that if we support youth to gain the skills they need, foster partnerships for change, and work with governments and other young people to create an enabling environment for youth development, then outcomes will improve.
To maximize our impact, Chemonics relies on four cornerstones to anchor our approach for youth development around the world. They form the basis on which we build all our programming in youth development.
Five tips for ensuring development projects benefit people of all genders
IREX
Why is gender equality such a tough nut to crack, and what can development professionals do about it?
It has been nearly 50 years since global research established the indisputable connection between gender inequalities, on the one hand, and the potential for positive economic, political, and social change on the other. But consistent, meaningful progress toward gender equality remains elusive. At the aggregate level, many gaps are worsening again for the first time in years.
Skills Matter - Results from a Cross-Country Analysis of Skills Acquisition and Employment Outcomes
Save the Children
This report presents findings from the use of the Employability Assessment Tool (EA Tool) among youth participating in Save the Children’s Skills to Succeed (S2S) program in three countries, which focuses on equipping disadvantaged young people to acquire skills, develop networks, and seek opportunities they need to get a job or build a business. The youth involved in SC’s S2S Program were both in and out-of-school.
Five tips for ensuring development projects benefit people of all genders
IREX
Why is gender equality such a tough nut to crack, and what can development professionals do about it?
It has been nearly 50 years since global research established the indisputable connection between gender inequalities, on the one hand, and the potential for positive economic, political, and social change on the other. But consistent, meaningful progress toward gender equality remains elusive. At the aggregate level, many gaps are worsening again for the first time in years.
Skills Matter - Results from a Cross-Country Analysis of Skills Acquisition and Employment Outcomes
Save the Children
This report presents findings from the use of the Employability Assessment Tool (EA Tool) among youth participating in Save the Children’s Skills to Succeed (S2S) program in three countries, which focuses on equipping disadvantaged young people to acquire skills, develop networks, and seek opportunities they need to get a job or build a business. The youth involved in SC’s S2S Program were both in and out-of-school.