Getting youth into productive employmentis an urgent policy issue for countries around the world.Many governments in low and middle-income countries areactively engaged in policies to help youth attain the skillsthey need to do well in work and in life, as well as to findsuitable employment. The involvement of the private sectorin youth skills development and employment is a complexissue because the nature of the firms and their motivationsvary significantly. Multinational corporations operating inlow and middle-income countries may be motivated by directproductivity or profit objectives - to secure a skilledworkforce, or reliable suppliers - but also, or evenprimarily, by corporate social responsibility (CSR) factors.Firms that supply training or employment services will bedriven by profit considerations when entering these marketsand deciding what services to offer and to whom. The purposeof this paper is threefold: (1) to provide a comprehensivelook at the way the private sector is involved in youthskills and employment in low- and middle-income countries,considering the broad range of program types and firm types;(2) to present and interpret the available evidence of theeffectiveness of this involvement; and (3) to understandwhere the private sector has been most effective atpromoting young people’s labor market success, and what canbe done to enhance the role of the private sector to achievethis objective. The report is organized as follows: chapterone gives introduction. Chapter two provides background tothe analysis of the private sector role in youth employmentin low- and middle-income countries. In chapter three theauthors characterize the private sector’s role moresystematically using the youth employment inventory, aglobal database of interventions that are designed tointegrate young people into the labor market. Chapter fourreviews the evidence of effectiveness of youth interventionsinvolving the private sector. Chapter five briefly drawstogether strands from the previous review, as well as fromthe broader literature, to gain an understanding of theinstitutional and other factors leading to (and in othercases preventing) successful public-private partnerships foryouth employment. Chapter six summarizes the main findingsof this review, and is followed by a discussion of key gapsin knowledge on the role of the private sector in differenttypes of youth employment intervention that future researchshould attempt to address, and a review of the main lessonsfor policy and programming emerging from the study.
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