Scaling Up Market-driven Youth Workforce Development Programs

This technical note presents case studies of three market-driven youth workforce development projects to demonstrate the variety of scale-up strategies and models available. They include:

• Fundación Paraguaya's San Francisco Agricultural School that enables students, ages 15–-19, to acquire technical and entrepreneurial skills;
• Partners of the Americas, a youth employability program that uses sports to target at-risk youth, ages 16–-24, in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay;
• Education Development Center's Haitian Out-of-School Youth Livelihood Initiative that provides basic education, life skills and entrepreneurship training to out-of-school youth in Haiti.

The note details experiences of the three initiatives, gives rationale for the selected scale-up strategy, and discusses the scale-up activity, sharing challenges and approaches for staying market-driven. Finally, the note emphasizes that although each organization employed different scale-up strategies, their lessons are similar. They include:

• Programs or models require time to prove their effectiveness;
• Different scale-up strategies work for different cost and funding levels;
• Maintaining quality is critical to effective scale-up;
• Market focus is crucial and should be a prime concern of youth workforce development projects entering a scale-up phase.