JOB SERIES #2: TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
TECHNICAL GUIDE
Asia and Middle East Economic Growth Best Practices (AMEG) Project Chemonics International Inc.
September 21, 2017
This publication was produced for review by the United States Agency for International Development. It was prepared by Chemonics International Inc.
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
TECHNICAL GUIDE
Contract No. GS-23F-0127P, Task Order No. AID-OAA-M-12-00008
DISCLAIMER
The authors’ views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States government.
CONTENTS
Contents ...... i Acronyms ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Executive Summary ...... 1 Section I ...... 2 Technical Guide ...... 2 A. Typical Challenges of Technology-Focused Partnerships ...... 3 B. Lessons and Approaches: Principles for Success ...... 5 C. Major Partnership Considerations: Questions to Ask ...... 11 D. Partnerships in Practice ...... 13 Section II ...... 16 Case Studies ...... 16 Case Study 1 ...... 16 A. Synopsis ...... 16 B. Organizational Approach and Challenges ...... 17 C. Lessons Learned ...... 18 Case Study 2 ...... 22 A. Synopsis ...... 22 B. Organizational Approach and Impact ...... 23 C. Lessons Learned ...... 24 Case Study 3 ...... 26 A. Synopsis ...... 26 B. Organizational Approach and Evolution ...... 27 C. Lessons Learned ...... 29
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ACRONYMS
AMEG Asia and Middle East Economic Growth Best Practices API application programming interface CCNA Cisco Certified Network Association CSR corporate social responsibility EFE Education for Employment Foundation GDA global development alliance HCD human-centered design ICT information communication technologies ICT4D information and communication technologies for development IP Internet protocol IT information technology MoU memorandum of understanding NetAcad Networking Academy PSUT Princess Sumaya University for Technology at Jordan University SMS short message service UNDP United Nations Development Programme UN Women United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women WFD Workforce Development Program
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This guide would not be possible without the candid reflections and dedication to learning of many organizations, particularly the technology partners highlighted in the case studies (Microsoft, Cisco, and Souktel), USAID implementing partners (FHI360), and USAID staff. Asia and Middle East Economic Growth Best Practices (AMEG) project thanks all of these parties for their time, attention, and focus on what works in workforce development and technology.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The global employment crisis is enormous, and nowhere is that reality felt more acutely than in the Middle East and North Africa. The political upheaval of the Arab Spring has continued to subside over the past several years, but substantial donor and government investments have yet to yield significant gains in employment. As donors and implementers pursue a way forward, they often reach for technological solutions. What these solutions look like in practice frequently falls short of expectations. The complexity of local workforce systems means sophisticated, well-thought-out technology partnerships, not just simple technological fixes, are necessary to address the employment crisis — an insight at the heart of this technical guide. Built on the Asia Middle East Economic Growth Best Practices (AMEG) project’s firsthand experience of piloting a technology partnership in Lebanon and supplemented by further research on other partnerships in the Middle East and North Africa, this guide helps fill a critical gap in programming literature by illuminating the dynamic intersection of workforce development, technology, and partnerships.
Comprised of three core elements, the guide begins by elucidating common challenges to technology partnerships in the workforce development community. Next, it provides recommendations on designing programs with these challenges in mind, offering principles for operationalizing such partnerships successfully and a set of critical questions to help programmers and practitioners evaluate their assumptions and work through the realities of implementation to the greatest degree possible. To facilitate programmers’ decision-making, the guide then presents short matrices that, based on AMEG’s experience, describe the most salient aspects of common types of partnerships. Finally, the guide offers three case studies from the Middle East, the region on which AMEG focuses in this guide. These case studies constitute the foundation of the guide as a whole, allowing the workforce development community of practice to use the learning of the recent past to inform the investment decisions of the future. AMEG chose these case studies based on certain criteria: (1) their ability to provide emblematic lessons and facilitate learning with tools and partnerships that practitioners regularly cite; (2) their applicability to the Middle East and other regions where USAID operates and the scope of their experiences in multiple countries; and (3) their potential to highlight successes and challenges that prompted adaptive management over a significant period of time.
In this guide, written primarily for U.S. government program officers but also for the wider workforce development community of practice, readers will learn: To anticipate and address common challenges to a technology-focused partnership initiative for workforce development To ask self-critical questions that help evaluate programming options (e.g., whether to support new technology platforms or leverage existing private options) and apply principles for successful implementation To apply the recent past’s lessons to future programming, thereby avoiding common pitfalls
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 1 SECTION I TECHNICAL GUIDE
The rise of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in workforce development programming has mirrored the rapid growth of technology worldwide in recent years. Although these technologies continue to grow in number and type, from employment portals to blended learning systems, many have been well- documented already in other U.S. government resources, like the “2013 Landscape Review: Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development.”
Although these technology tools change rapidly (four years ago, few would have anticipated artificial intelligence bots as part of development programming), our purpose here is different. Most technology tools require partnerships to put to use. Despite the deep literature and resource base on partnerships within USAID programming, including for workforce development, there is no specific resource to guide program design in the cross section of the two: technology partnerships for workforce development. This guide meets this need, providing a deeper look at the common challenges that technology partnerships face and how to set them up for success. In this guide, primarily intended for U.S. government program officers but also written with the wider workforce development community of practice in mind, readers will learn: To anticipate and address common challenges to a technology-focused partnership initiative for workforce development To ask self-critical questions that help evaluate programming options (e.g., about whether the U.S. government should support the use of a new technology platform or leverage existing private options) and apply principles for successful implementation To apply the lessons of the recent past to future programming, thereby avoiding common pitfalls Organization of the technical guide. To accomplish these objectives, the guide first presents typical challenges of partnerships for workforce development that leverage the skills, capacities, and resources of large and small technology providers. Then it describes several principles for success that draw, in part, on case studies from the Middle East, this guide’s principal geographic focus and a region with an acute youth employment crisis. The illustrative matrix that follows includes a series of critical questions that constitute a provisional checklist for program designers as well as key information designers should bear in mind as they evaluate potential technology partnerships and solutions. This guide focuses on the relationship between technology partnerships and commonly discussed workforce development mechanisms — such as employment portals, industry certification initiatives, and learning management systems — but the principles this guide highlights and the questions it proffers will help designers and implementers vet any technology partnership and workforce development mechanism.
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Following these core elements are three case studies that provided the foundation for this document, selected based on their (1) ability to provide emblematic lessons and facilitate learning with tools and partnerships regularly cited by practitioners; (2) applicability to the Middle East and other regions where USAID operates, preferably drawing on experiences in multiple countries; and (3) potential to highlight successes and challenges that prompted adaptive management over a significant period of time. These three cases are as follows: Souktel’s Baladna (Palestine). A little more than a decade ago, Souktel, an ICT4D small business, was founded in Ramallah to develop an employment portal and job-matching tool called Baladna. Since then, Souktel’s evolution as a company in Palestine and several other Middle Eastern and North African countries has reinforced the broader lessons learned about many of the challenges and principles for success this guide describes. E-Quality, Cisco NetAcad with UN Women (Jordan). Cisco’s Networking Academy (NetAcad) program has worked with USAID and others in more than 40 countries. NetAcad’s structure is relatively consistent from place to place. In Jordan, NetAcad’s collaboration with United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) achieved long- term success, significantly increasing women’s rate of participation in a high- demand labor market: Internet protocol (IP) networking. Microsoft/Silatech, YouthWorks/Ta3mal. A holistic e-learning system and job placement tool, YouthWorks, also known as Ta3mal in the Middle East, began in 2012 as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative within Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft and its main partner, Silatech, have worked with USAID and others with varied success. This technical guide grew out of AMEG’s experience of piloting YouthWorks/Ta3mal in Lebanon and serves to compare that experience with those of other implementing partners elsewhere. These experiences constitute the case study that serves as the backbone of this guide that will help others apply the combined lessons learned from these experiences.
A. TYPICAL CHALLENGES OF TECHNOLOGY-FOCUSED PARTNERSHIPS Below AMEG presents core challenges that reflect the obstacles to success encountered in the referenced case studies. AMEG found these challenges to be consistent with other experiences across a range of technology partnerships relevant to workforce development.
A1. OFF-THE-SHELF SOLUTIONS A standard product that meets the needs of a broad and diverse user base without requiring changes is often the main soft- or hardware a technology company offers. Think Microsoft Office software. Microsoft focuses on selling a basic model that requires minimal adjustments, if any. But this approach falls short on the human side of workforce development. Users come in many different types, and their goals often lie beyond the reach of a simple soft- or hardware solution. They are job seekers needing gainful employment or employers needing strong employees. Given the complexities of local systems targeted by workforce development initiatives, it is exceedingly hard to
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 3 find an off-the-shelf product capable of meeting these users’ needs without making significant changes to that product. Target demographics vary substantially and, depending on the location, a program may use a product to target groups that are urban or rural, young or middle-aged, social-media savvy or new to basic short message service (SMS) technology. It is the rare workforce development initiative that can in full confidence rely on a low-cost, off-the-shelf system provided by a technology partner to meet its needs.
A2. MISALIGNED INCENTIVES OR EXPECTATIONS Any partnership will succeed or fail based on the incentives and expectations of the AN EXPECTATIONS GAME respective parties, and workforce-focused If expectations are clear and incentives aligned, technology partnerships are no different. a technology partnership is well positioned for success. If the opposite is true, misaligned Private sector companies, meanwhile, have a expectations or incentives lead to business rationale for their work, and despite implementation challenges. Microsoft’s Ta3mal, the proliferation of CSR initiatives in recent for example, is a free and tangential software offering aimed at building good will with local years, soft- or hardware companies are no governments to secure license protections for different. Donors and local youth-focused the company’s profit-generating products NGO implementers of workforce programs more easily. Ta3mal’s functionality and responsiveness to user needs, therefore, are are understandably intent on producing lower priorities for Microsoft than the outcomes like high job placement and functionality and responsiveness of its other leveraged funds. For them, technology is products. Microsoft’s estimate of the costs involved also did not square with the actual necessarily a secondary concern, a means to needs for successful implementation, at least in achieve those goals. Alongside each of these the Lebanon experience. Initially, AMEG was organizational imperatives are each party’s told that Ta3mal would only require $10,000 per year to operate. This information led to a expectations. Large soft- or hardware serious underestimation of actual providers, like Cisco and Microsoft, see requirements, misaligned expectations, and opportunities to improve their positioning several implementation challenges. The incentive for Cisco to maintain NetAcad’s with current and potential clients, a reality functionality and responsiveness, in contrast, is that CSR and partnership language can easily directly and explicitly connected to a core obscure. Finally, a partnership’s mechanism of business need — skilled IP networking professionals who can cost-effectively service engagement — whether it is a contract, Cisco’s clientele in a given country. This clear grant, or public-private partnership/global focus led to a straightforward model replicable development alliance (GDA) with a not only in Jordan with E-Quality but also worldwide. memorandum of understanding (MoU) — matters, and a technology partnership that chooses the wrong one will have a rocky start. Honestly identifying and reckoning with each partner’s true organizational incentives and expectations prior to executing an agreement is foundational (see box).
A3. UNDERINVESTMENT IN RESOURCES The issue with a standard or off-the-shelf solution is not only that it is more likely than a tailored solution to fail to meet user needs but also that it invites the faulty assumption that the technology itself is all that is required — that rollout will be cheap and uptake will be swift and lasting. As the development community has attended increasingly to ICT4D, practitioners have come to understand the problem with this assumption.
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Without a significant, sustained investment in human resources and associated costs, even the most advanced technology will run aground. In other words, a strong partnership means joining forces with more than just a software company — it also requires careful, thorough planning and budgeting to drive good execution. Serious resource investment must be central part of that process. This guide highlights potential pitfalls of underfunding design and associated long-term program support.
A4. CONTROL The power to dictate changes, particularly in software, is especially important for workforce development programs whose success or failure depends on the ability of a particular product, like an employment portal, to meet users’ needs. How much control each party in a technology partnership will have over such a product is a chief area of negotiation, particularly in partnerships that include large solutions providers like Microsoft. Limited control over a given software product can be closely tied to the prevalence of the other three key challenges described above. If the provider insists on maintaining full control over the product but does not invest in the resources needed to make it responsive to users’ ongoing needs, users will grow increasingly frustrated and turn away from the software, and local implementers’ relationships with users will suffer. Job seekers cannot be expected to patiently wait for an update that may never be made to a tool while their credibility with employers diminishes, and vice versa. But if the provider makes enough of the product’s source code modifiable — for example, via application programming interface (API) options — instead of wholly proprietary, local implementers can more easily tailor a system to their users’ real-time feedback. Allowing local implementers to alter a solution reinforces local ownership over long- term outcomes. Regardless of the solution chosen, it is important to budget realistically. Less centrally controlled options, like APIs, may lend themselves to tailoring but require more time and other resources to implement and sustain.
B. LESSONS AND APPROACHES: PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESS The recommendations that follow respond directly to the challenges described above, helping U.S. government program officers and the wider workforce development community of practice to apply the lessons AMEG has learned to the design of technology partnerships and, in turn, increase the likelihood of their success. Exhibit 1, below, briefly describes these complementary principles.
B1. FOCUS ON PROVEN LABOR MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND PRIVATE SECTOR NEEDS Aligning workforce development initiatives with demonstrable private sector needs and tangible employment opportunities is not a new concept, but it is difficult to put into practice. The extent to which a given technology partnership does so is a fundamental determinant of its success. Intermediation services provided by groups like the Education for Employment Foundation (EFE) illustrate this principle. EFE’s active labor market approach taps concrete employer commitment to filling jobs first and builds training to prepare candidates second. To do this at scale requires smart use of blended
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 5 EXHIBIT 1. LESSONS AND APPROACHES: PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESS
learning management systems, which EFE has REACHING FOR SCALE recently piloted in partnership with BlueDrop, a For the last ten years, EFE has been a pioneer in Canadian e-learning company (see box). When demand-driven workforce development efforts, deciding how best to build a technology designing and delivering training based on partnership for workforce development, the most companies’ concrete demand for workers and commitment to hire youth job seekers. EFE has important lesson is that technology alone cannot placed approximately 20,000 youth in jobs but deliver job placement. The demand from now has more ambitious goals, aiming to place employers must exist first. 80,000 more by 2020. To do so, EFE has engaged BlueDrop to design and roll out a blended learning system that leverages the company’s two Technology partnerships that work backwards decades of experience building learning from this demand will always be more successful management systems for unions, local governments, and private sector companies in than those that do not. In Jordan, Cisco’s North America. The blended learning system will NetAcad initiative known as E-Quality, combine interactive online and in-class instruction implemented by UN Women with USAID funds, with field visits, building on EFE’s existing retail sales curriculum. Such blended learning offers a good example of a technology partnership approaches more effectively use student and aligned with private sector employment trainer time and are increasingly the standard for opportunities. Started on the back of a series of educators and workforce professionals. Although EFE’s pilot in Jordan suggested higher costs due to major government initiatives to position Jordan as the need for trainers with computer skills and a market leader in information technology (IT) Internet-enabled facilities, it also showed better services, the program also drew on Cisco’s outcomes — trainees securing jobs more quickly and higher retention rates due to stronger expanding clientele in the country. Demand for IP preparation. networking professionals, the core training and
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certification prioritized by the program, soared in the years after E-Quality’s launch. Although Jordan can tap into significant funding pools to help subsidize such initiatives, the program’s approach has shown its staying power and achieved a certain level of sustainability, even after USAID support ended. Why? Students saw their peers complete the program and earn high-quality jobs and faster promotions, which reinforced demand for NetAcad certification courses. If partnerships do not identify a clear demand, as E-Quality did, they cannot expect technology to provide a simple solution.
B2. ALIGN THE INCENTIVES FOR PARTNERS Every organization will bring different incentives to a potential partnership, and it is critical to evaluate them carefully during the design phase, taking every possible measure to align incentives with desired outcomes (e.g., job placement or the increased participation of women in the labor force). The CSR programs of a large business and associated tools may be well developed or relatively nascent, influencing how well the organization can clarify its own goals. Cisco’s goal for NetAcad, for example, is clear: to develop a stronger, more cost-effective workforce locally to service Cisco clients in the communities that use Cisco products and services worldwide. Servicing these clients has been Cisco’s rationale for developing networking training institutes since its NetAcad initiative began nearly 20 years ago. If Cisco did not provide local, cost-effective training on IP networking, Cisco’s clients would have to pay a cost-prohibitive premium for international Cisco trainers, making the company uncompetitive in the long run.
In contrast to Cisco’s NetAcad initiative, Microsoft’s YouthWorks/Ta3mal tool is more tangential to its company’s core focus. It may allow Microsoft to engage with host- country governments, but Microsoft’s main goal is to sell its core soft- and hardware products. Ta3mal’s relative newness has meant the company has yet to work out many of its design kinks to improve its user-friendliness.
However one approaches the question of incentives, it is important not to ask a partner to contribute something too far outside the partner’s core focus. As Souktel has discovered, for example, to approach a telecoms provider, like Jawwal or Wataniya in Palestine, one needs to appeal to the provider’s goal of expanding and retaining its user pool. Doing so places one in a better position to argue that the provider should (1) reduce the cost of SMS messages to users of the implementer’s workforce development service or initiative, and (2) integrate the implementer’s training into the provider’s content bundles at no cost. In other words, if the provider sees the implementer’s goals as directly contributing to its expansion and retention of users, the two potential partners’ incentives align.
B3. INVEST APPROPRIATELY AND ANTICIPATE RESOURCE NEEDS Although a particular technology can have a powerful draw, making it seem like a magic bullet, it is important to clarify in the design stage that making technology work cannot be done on the cheap. Tremendous investment in the human infrastructure is required to make a technology partnership work well. When YouthWorks/Ta3mal has worked
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 7 well in Iraq and Egypt, there has been a major donor- or government-funded backbone delivery mechanism with several million dollars of investment at a minimum, spurring not only social media presence but also personal outreach to employers and job placement agencies or career development centers to build trust and source the right candidates. Souktel has also highlighted the importance of investing in Baladna’s human infrastructure from the outset in Palestine — its four staff were essential to conduct outreach with students and employers, build credibility with employers, and gain traction for the initiative as a whole.
It is worth noting that this principle is not unique to workforce development technology partnerships. Technology companies in any field must be far more than software companies; they must hire battalions of field staff and mobilize training programs to operationalize successfully and best meet user needs. Workforce development specialists worldwide recognize the same: Employment services programs can work, but they require costly human and operational resource investments. The challenge for designers is how to forecast accurately and then cost-effectively manage these resources. One informative example is the Tunisia Mashrou3i GDA, implemented by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and funded by USAID and the Italian government, which drew on the Hewlett Packard Life entrepreneurship training platform. As the program’s evaluation showed, this effort cast a wide net to reach a broad range of aspiring entrepreneurs. The program subsequently provided supplementary blended learning approaches to the most motivated entrepreneurs — those who had demonstrated their abilities and interest by completing several different modules of the online curriculum. In this way, the program focused its limited trainer resources on the students most motivated to take advantage of the program’s assistance and likely to go on to create or expand businesses and jobs. Supported by matching funds from the Italian government and Hewlett Packard, each job created by Mashrou3i entrepreneurs cost approximately $2,000 (or $1,000 in USAID funds), a figure consistent with findings for active labor market programs in a 2013 World Bank study.1
B4. GROUND TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS IN USER REALITIES Take the time to carefully evaluate what users need and want: carry out a human- centered design (HCD) process. This principle is tied directly to the principle of local ownership, described below, which emphasizes understanding the local landscape, empowering local actors, and tailoring whatever technology a partnership is dedicated to operationalizing to the technology’s target user. Carrying out an HCD process, in practical terms, means looking for ways to embed and capitalize on technologies already in use, enabling the partnership to piggyback on the credibility and user base of an existing tool (e.g., WhatsApp or Facebook). Ta3mal/Iraq postings, for example, were built into Facebook feeds, a strategy that helped Ta3mal gain considerable traction. In addition, as any party of a partnership contemplates how to build out an effective technology partnership or program, it should work with its partners to tap the wisdom
1 Angel-Urdinola, D.; Kuddo, A.; and Semlali, A. (2013). Building Effective Employment Programs for Unemployed Youth in the Middle East and North Africa. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
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and guidance of the HCD toolkits and associated processes that exist in many HCD IN PRACTICE different forums worldwide (see box). According to IDEO.org, a leader in HCD for development, the concept consists of three It is also worth emphasizing the phases, described briefly below. Although the importance of cultural factors while mindsets, tools, and goals at the heart of HCD carrying out these processes, like the broadly apply to many if not all development challenges, they are particularly relevant to tendency of youth who are unemployed technology solutions. Indeed, IDEO is and well educated in the Middle East to headquartered in Silicon Valley for just that hold out for a job that meets their social reason. For greater detail, see the organization’s design kit and field guide to circle’s or family’s definition of HCD, both available online. “acceptable,” as the former CEO of Inspiration. Learn directly from the people EFE/Jordan writes (see box below). you are designing for as you immerse yourself in their lives and come to deeply understand their needs. The extent to which a local system’s Ideation. Make sense of what you learned, gender dynamics, amid other cultural identify opportunities for design, and prototype possible solutions. factors, affect the implementation of a Implementation. Bring your solution to life workforce program cannot be and, eventually, to market. Your solution overstated. Part C, below, includes will succeed because you have kept the very people you intend to serve at the heart of questions to help designers and the process. implementers consider these issues, but it is also imperative to consult other assessment tools and resources (e.g., the Guide to Assessing and Designing Tourism Workforce Development Programs produced by the USAID Educational Quality Improvement Program 3). Assessment teams should achieve a gender balance and use instruments that take into account both female and male circumstances as well as the perspectives of the different groups that make up the target population, such as marginalized, urban, and rural people.
B5. UNDERSTAND HOW TO EVOLVE Given the rapid pace at which technological tools and the groups that use them change, it NOTES FROM THE FIELD is easy for partnerships with specific "While a woman’s decision to enter training technology solutions and ideas to lose their programs is often her own, a woman’s decision to join the workforce was made by relevance or find themselves using outdated the male members of her family. Her features that turn away potential users. investment in the success of her training-to- Program designers and implementers, employment transition is thus mediated by the goals and expectations of her family. No therefore, must continually seek ways to matter the matchmaking and job-readiness make their tools and ideas responsive to training we provided, the ultimate decision was needs of the moment and reflective of not her own.” broader trends in technology. Without a mobile-friendly site, or an app, for example, a —Mayyada Abu Jaber, former CEO for EFE/Jordan, July 5, 2017, “Why Matchmaking in portal like YouthWorks/Ta3mal inevitably Youth Employment Programs in the Middle East will fall short of the expectations of youth North Africa Aren’t Working,” Stanford Social seeking jobs, the tool’s main target user Innovation Review group. Those maintaining platforms like
Ta3mal should also consider the growing popularity of open source technology and the desire for software solutions that can easily be modified to accommodate users’ needs.
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 9 At the same time, designers and implementers should carefully and strategically think about the impact that modifications to solutions will have on users. For example, YouthWorks/Ta3mal recognized a few years after its launch that because it allowed partners to add any training material they wished to the platform but did not curate those materials, only a few intrepid and persistent users were taking advantage of those materials. Ta3mal revised its approach and replaced the material on its platform with curated content from Alison Online Training, a leading UK-based education technology company. But in doing so, Ta3mal limited who could engage with the platform’s content because nearly all of it was in English.
B6. EMPHASIZE LOCAL OWNERSHIP: PLAN FOR SUSTAINABILITY Tailoring program designs to local context is a fundamental principle of any development A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES program. Yet the promise of a technology YouthWorks/Ta3mal has seen different results in different places depending on the level of solution may shift the focus away from investment and planning for local ownership. In working within a local system. Early on, for Iraq, for example, the USAID Foras project example, Souktel offered its pre-built job- served as a backbone entity with millions of dollars to hire staff and work with regional matching solution, and implementers applied career centers that kick started the platform’s it without anticipating how it would respond traction with users. Combined with the lack of to the specific needs of the communities it local options in Iraq, this success made the portal attractive both to job seekers and was supposed to assist or potential bumps in employers searching for candidates. In the road locally. Eventually, Souktel realized Lebanon, users preferred local alternatives to the value of considering the following YouthWorks/Ta3mal that already existed, despite their weaknesses (e.g., their lack of questions before presenting a solution for a entry-level job postings). The portal’s usability particular community: and functionality issues further compromised its appeal to potential users (see Case Study 3 What other recruiting agencies were for details). already present locally? What web presence did they have? Was a regionally present solution already in place that had existing relationships with employers in high-demand sectors?
Souktel quickly recognized it needed to update its approach and incorporate an assessment period into the design process of a given technology product if such a product was even necessary. When executed well, this approach equips an initiative to leverage local resources and position a program for sustainability. In Morocco, for example, USAID’s Career Center project (http://vcc.careercenter.ma/vcc/) — led by FHI360, International Research and Exchanges Board, and EFE — realized a new employment portal was unnecessary and instead developed an aggregate search tool that allowed target users and stakeholders to tap into existing local recruiting resources or job-search engines. In Palestine, such an effort might draw on Jobs.ps and engage networks of local NGOs carrying out workforce development programs or operating career centers (see Case Study I for details). The contrasting experiences with Ta3mal in Iraq and Lebanon evince the importance of thinking critically about the potential to enhance existing, locally available private solutions or develop new ones (see box).
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C. MAJOR PARTNERSHIP CONSIDERATIONS: QUESTIONS TO ASK Any successful program design process must continually pose and address self-critical questions. The questions in Exhibit 2, below, provide a reference for U.S. government program officers when considering technology partnerships and associated solutions to enhance workforce development programming. This list is by no means exhaustive; designers should treat it only as a starting point. Used in conjunction with the technical guide and associated case studies, the list will allow program officers to collect feedback from local stakeholders, implementing partners, government institutions, private sector partners, and technology solutions providers on key issue areas.
EXHIBIT 2. CRITICAL QUESTIONS
Key Questions Comments
Target Market: Job Seekers, Employers, and Other Stakeholders What characteristics define the primary target Consider different population segments, both job population? seekers and employers. For example, an unemployed college-educated youth will seek How large is the population, and what kind of access different jobs than a youth without a college (mobile or non-mobile) to technology does it have? degree. Similarly, retail sales employers will have different needs than IT firms, banks, or blue-collar How, if at all, does the population currently access the industry (e.g., vehicle maintenance and repair) services the contemplated partnership would provide? employers.
What social media or IT communications tools does If the primary means of accessing the Internet is a the population most commonly use? smartphone for a large portion of the target group, smartphone capability is crucial. If the How do job seekers and employers find one another? target group uses mobile telephones that are not How does local culture influence the labor market? smartphones, SMS platforms may be more inclusive and encourage better uptake. Where do employers turn within the local marketplace to find high-potential candidates? More urbanization may indicate stronger potential to scale. What are the key industries and local employers with the most significant hiring needs? How could the Recognize that a technology partnership solution contemplated partnership and associated technology may not be appropriate to meet the needs of the align with them? primary target group. For example, online training cannot teach certain skills that may be in demand What key difficulties do employers face in the hiring (e.g., nursing and automotive repair). and vetting process?
Is there an existing labor market assessment to draw from? If so, vet the findings again with host-country partners and employers.
Has each of the contemplated partnership’s prospective parties allowed enough time to conduct an HCD process?
Is there significant migration from rural to urban areas?
What skill gaps are currently paramount in the labor market? Which are within the manageable control of the contemplated partnership?
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 11 Key Questions Comments
Cost How much does the service cost to install and Be conservative. Remember technology providers maintain? have incentives to underestimate real costs and What are partners of all types willing to pay, and how overestimate ease of use. Take care to separate likely are they to follow through? costs by partner type. Make sure costs do not conflict with the partner’s interests or incentives. Do partners have a good track record of accurately estimating costs? Think beyond technology. Human resources must often address products’ shortcomings. For Is there a cost to users, particularly youth? example, technology solutions may not help employers identify the best candidates in pools of What type of labor costs will managing rollout and online applicants. Human resources may redress maintenance entail? such issues.
Consider surveying potential partners, and address the possible need for partial subsidies in the short- term.
Remember costs to users may discourage use at scale. Technology Partner and Solution How responsive is the technology provider to Carefully vet any product or solution. Remember requested changes to the platform? to ask to use the system to better appreciate the user’s perspective. How motivated is the provider by the potential scale and success of the initiative? Seek out and obtain thorough formal and informal references. How flexible is the provider in adapting the solution to the target market’s needs? Balance consideration of a potential technology platform’s pitfalls with consideration of its benefits. Do USAID, other donors, or host-country governments already have existing partnerships with Beware of the potential for unanticipated the provider? If so, what do their formal and informal challenges, including costs that are higher than references say about the solution and the provider’s expected and limited leverage over non-traditional modus operandi? partners.
How relevant is the content of the platform to prospective employers’ needs? Is the content general and inflexible and, therefore, unlikely to be respected by prospective employers? Or can it be quickly tailored to employers’ needs at reasonable cost?
Can the content be curated by local staff, or must the international provider make any needed changes? Whether and how any online content is curated will determine how useful it is to youth and employers alike.
What is the platform’s track record of supporting and tracking job placements for users in other countries? Sustainability
Has the design team considered the local landscape of Recognize the power in tapping into and operators and potential solutions? Does the technology strengthening an existing local system. compete directly with other local options? Is it better to strengthen existing solutions than to develop new Understand the risk associated with promoting a ones? new tool or technology.
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Key Questions Comments
Where does the motivation for the initiative come Carefully vet the concept with local potential from? Does it come from the donor community, host- partners of many types and sizes. Ask directly for country government, or local private sector? honesty and skepticism.
What are the partner’s core incentives? Focus on a Map out partners and evaluate their incentives, business’s fundamental priorities rather than surface- taking care to consider more than their stated level rationales, particularly in the case of large private level interest. sector solutions providers. Consider the importance of high-level buy-in and Is there significant government support for the co-investment when working with large potential platform? If so, is that support at the central (state) or private sector partners. municipal level? Seek out leveraged resources or cost-share to How strong is the level of local ownership for the make buy-in concrete from partners. concept? Align the concept with market interests and Is it possible to identify private sector partners, demands, particularly those of prospective particularly employers and mobile operators? For employers. example, a dominant mobile operator may be convinced to provide the use of an SMS platform at a Build realistic incentives into partnership reduced cost. structures.
Are local NGO partners engaged in the initiative? If so, Allow dialogue with the private sector to drive in what way? Those that are already actively building design decisions. relationships with prospective employers and sourcing good candidates that meet those employers’ needs are more likely to be positioned to help the initiative succeed. USAID Programmatic Considerations How will the partnership with the technology provider Consider the appropriate mechanism to establish and other local partners be structured? the partnership and how extensively to define each partner’s roles and responsibilities in any Is there any existing USAID program into which the MoUs. For example, an MoU may be more technology or partnership could be integrated? effective if it has more details on appropriate response times to troubleshoot issues. On the Are the timeline and resources realistic to achieve other hand, an MoU with fewer details may significant progress toward objectives? provide greater flexibility, as did the Tunisia Mashrou3i GDA.
Remember to consider what information will be shared, when, and by whom as well as how the partners will mutually assess progress or reconsider the solution’s structure or obligations.
D. PARTNERSHIPS IN PRACTICE This guide includes case studies (see Section II) that provide critical insight into the practical considerations relevant to building partnerships that leverage certain technologies to achieve workforce outcomes. Here, the guide provides two exhibits with brief summaries of relevant factors to help inform designers as they choose between options within commonly used categories: employment portals (Exhibit 3, next page) and technology industry certification initiatives (Exhibit 4, page 15).
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 13 EXHIBIT 3. EMPLOYMENT PORTALS YouthWorks/Ta3mal JobMatch/Baladna Value Proposition Off-the-shelf tool for matching youth with career guidance Highly customized job-matching portal, tailored to and training courses to enhance employability, context and needs, to place job seekers of all types entrepreneurship, vocational, and soft skills. Matches job (white or blue-collar) with employers on demand. seekers with employers to fill concrete job needs at limited cost to either party, a key difference from other employment portals, e.g. Bayt.com, HireLebanese, and LebanonPush or Yemen’s I Am a Technician. Partners and Motivations Microsoft is a large, multinational company with a USAID Souktel is a U.S. small business with approximately 30 partnership track record. This initiative is not a corporate employees that provides this platform and focus, and Microsoft financial and human resources to complementary services. Donors, including USAID, are support the platform have historically been less than the company’s primary client base and emphasis is $200,000 per year worldwide. Microsoft’s primary motive placed on responsiveness and tailoring to client needs. is to build good will with local governments to advocate The company reports responding to requests for for license protections for Microsoft’s profit-generating modifications about one to two weeks after they are software products. submitted.
Silatech, a sizeable Qatari Foundation, provides very Local telecom providers are frequent private limited support to implementing partners to fix bugs. sector partners, lowering costs for users of SMS- supported systems. Microsoft and Silatech leverage Bayt.com, a job-matching engine in the Middle East. Geographic Experience Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt) and certain Palestine, Jordan, Algeria, Rwanda, Somalia, and others. countries in Asia and Africa. Cost Supporting investment is key to success. Microsoft reports a Transparent cost structure. Approximately $75,000 in $10,000 upfront cost, but real costs for employer and basic upfront cost to develop an application to a user outreach and management are closer to $750,000 project’s needs. More intensive user-focused design, per year. For example, in Iraq and Egypt, major investment communications strategies, and rollout to enhance by USAID or the host-country government provided in- tailoring and likelihood of uptake at scale can cost person follow-up with students and employers. several hundred thousand dollars. Potential for Customization Minimal. Similar to other Microsoft systems, this package High. Company emphasis on customized, agile solution is subject to restrictions that often limit the degree to design, including in-person scoping, iterative software which the product can be tailored to users or dynamics in development, and full support for service launch, a given locale. Microsoft does not share source code; all sustainable delivery, and handover to local partners. changes must be requested through Microsoft’s CSR office Tailored to each country or operating environment. in Egypt. Microsoft and Silatech resources to fix bugs or Emphasis on user-centered design, local research with address requests for customization can take up to six stakeholders and partners to vet current preferences months or more due to limited staff and resources of and existing platforms. Full flexibility to develop, post, both partners. Integration with Bayt.com further and curate content tailored to partner employers or complicates updates and customization requests. No other partners. Reported turnaround time to requests mobile app available. Mobile accessibility of site is weak at for modifications is one to two weeks. High priority best. given to HCD process and local landscape assessments. Sustainability Low. Although Microsoft often works with local partners, Medium/high. Souktel prioritizes HCD, local systems, it does not have a vision for sustainability past donor or private sector engagement, and full flexibility to government funding. develop, post, and curate content tailored to partner employers or other partners. Souktel often partners with local, private sector telecoms providers, lowering costs for users of SMS-supported systems.
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EXHIBIT 4. TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY CERTIFICATION INITIATIVES NetAcad Workforce Development Program
Value Proposition NetAcad is the flagship initiative of Cisco’s CSR Oracle’s Workforce Development Program (WFD), programs. It responds to workforce shortages in IT part of the company’s “University” corporate training professionals to design, build, install, troubleshoot, arm, was launched 15 years ago to respond to clear, secure, and manage computer networking worldwide. compelling workforce shortages in IT professionals to By providing cost-effective training solutions with support its clients. Oracle states that it covers most recognized industry certification, particularly the Cisco costs, with the partner institution or student paying a Certified Network Associate (CCNA) designation, it fraction of the overall price tag, although this cost is still increases incomes and job placement prospects. significant.
Partners and Motivations Cisco is a global leader in networking solutions and Oracle is a large, global information communication hardware, with thousands of employees and offices technologies (ICT) leader in comprehensive cloud worldwide. CSR at Cisco has been a serious priority applications, platform services, and engineered systems for 20 years, and executives, including CEO Chuck with more than 420,000 customers and engagements in Robbins, continue to support it. The business logic for 145 countries. The company’s WFD program is new to Cisco is self-evident, since its clients need an expanded the donor landscape. Its experience with donors is pool of trained and preferably certified professionals to limited to EU funding in Europe. Oracle has a clear service their needs locally and cost-effectively. Other business incentive, with serious growth in Africa and partners include donors and implementers like UN the Middle East and a need for a larger pool of trained Women, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, IT professionals to service Oracle’s clients cost- the Trust for the Americas’ Centros Programa de effectively. Oportunidades para el Empleo a través de la Technología en las Américas (POETA), and the European Union.
Geographic Experience NetAcad and USAID have partnered in more than 40 China and India primarily, on the back of major countries since 2000 in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, government investments in IT training and workforce Europe and Eurasia, and Latin America. The preparation, where governments have seriously partnership has expanded in recent years to include invested in IT training and workforce development. the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute. Cisco recently began expanding its WFD efforts elsewhere, e.g. the Middle East, as its growth requires.
Cost There is demonstrable partner co-investment and buy- Oracle significantly subsidizes its costs. Although who in for NetAcad. Cisco subsidizes equipment bundles for uses it depends on many factors (e.g., the local training training institutes. In many countries, cost-share has delivery partner and funding sources), it is primarily been a part of the mandate for NetAcad implementing used in classrooms and by instructors. Costs for partners. students are kept low.
Potential for Customization Low. Courses and certification requirements demand Low. As with NetAcad, training and skills needs demand consistency in training methods, material, and content, materials, equipment, and methods similar equipment. Customizable pieces include the types of across countries and initiatives. Given the newness of partners (universities, private vocational training Oracle to donor-funded efforts, the WFD program may institutes, and donors) and scope or intended be open to customize certain elements as needs outcomes of the project’s design. require.
Sustainability Medium. NetAcad institutions regularly continue to Low. Oracle’s model is new to the donor landscape, operate after donor funding, as seen in Jordan (see given its past focus on host-country government- Case Study 2). subsidized training.
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 15 SECTION II CASE STUDIES
CASE STUDY 1 SOUKTEL’S BALADNA AND JOB MATCHING IN THE WEST BANK
Souktel, a U.S. small business focused on ICT4D, started in direct response to an information gap in the West Bank labor market in 2006: Employers reported they had jobs available but felt they did not have the right candidates to fill them. Meanwhile, few Palestinian universities had career centers to connect graduates with these opportunities. Just as importantly, the increasing availability of mobile phone service at the time meant most youth seeking jobs had access to SMS communication. This case study examines Souktel’s experience addressing the information gap via a job-matching service called Baladna from 2006 to the present (see box). Baladna is still available at http://www.souktel.ps/en/employer. AMEG selected Baladna because of the length of its experience and Souktel’s ability to candidly compare and contrast its work in Palestine and other countries in the Middle East and Africa in the recent past.
A. SYNOPSIS
Before launching Souktel, the company’s co-founder Jacob Korenblum was the BASICS OF BALADNA monitoring and evaluation director for Baladna initially targeted entry-level graduating Palestinian university students needing jobs and Ruwwad, a USAID-funded Palestinian companies frustrated by the time and resources workforce development project. In the required to hire staff that met their needs. For process of completing initial field students, and later all job seekers, it offered SMS or online signup and resume packaging. assessments for Ruwwad, he observed a Once they signed up and their resume profile clear need for a job-matching service to was active, they would receive regular SMS bridge supply-demand gaps in the labor updates with relevant vacancies through voice calls and SMS once or twice a week and have market. Nevertheless, Ruwwad’s primary the chance to express interest in those focus was on providing a wider range of opportunities. Souktel provided responsive holistic empowerment programming by technical support, guidance on resume building, and job searching tips either in person or establishing youth development centers virtually. For employers, Baladna screened and a network of affiliated clubs. With this potential candidates for vacant positions, need in mind, Mr. Korenblum worked streamlining the hiring process. As one wrote later, “Within two days [of using the Souktel with Palestinian programmers to build a platform], I was able to hire the right people working prototype of Baladna, an SMS- from the right locations." based job-matching service to provide university students and recent graduates with a tool to connect directly with potential employers. Although other technology-enabled job-search, recruitment, or advertising services (e.g., Jobs.ps) have appeared online since Mr. Korenblum began working with the programmers, no such service existed at the time. Job seekers and employers relied
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on bulletin boards dedicated to job ads and traditional social networks, both highly inefficient, to find and fill jobs. Moreover, social media was in its infancy. Facebook, for example, was still limited to a select subset of students at elite American universities. With a one-year $100,000 grant from the World Bank and a small team of staff, Souktel agreed to launch the platform that would serve as a resource for job seekers at four different universities: Birzeit University, The Arab-American University of Jenin, Al-Quds University, and al-Najah University. Only two of these already had career centers. Souktel’s staff for the project, housed at Birzeit (which had no full-scale career center), subsequently launched simultaneous outreach campaigns targeted at students and employers, gaining increasing momentum and traction over time. Initially, the service only registered job seekers at these universities, mostly students nearing graduation. But after the initial agreement period with the universities and the World Bank, Souktel expanded the user base to all job seekers as it pursued sustainability.
B. ORGANIZATIONAL APPROACH AND CHALLENGES Dedicated, locally sourced, incentivized staff. Souktel staff pioneering the Baladna initiative had a versatile combination of skills essential to any lean startup operation as well as technical programming and implementation savvy and capacity. This focused resourcing was important because, as other technology partnerships for workforce development, like YouthWorks/Ta3mal in Lebanon, have found, one cannot rely on the technology itself to drive user traffic. In other words, if you simply build it, they may not come. A focused complement of staff is necessary to carry out time-intensive marketing, management, and technological tasks to make the system operational. Only in this way was Souktel’s team able to conduct outreach with students and employers, gain their trust, train them how to use Baladna, and quickly and efficiently fix the issues users raised. In addition, Souktel went a step further, incentivizing staff with employee stock, something unusual among local companies. Staff, therefore, had a dual mandate not uncommon in social enterprises: serve the mission and grow the business in the process. Notably, almost all staff were local. Mr. Korenblum, new at the time to the West Bank, made sure all members of Souktel’s staff were Palestinian. Even as Souktel has evolved, it has maintained a staff that consists mostly of Palestinians.
Charging users. From the beginning, Baladna was a fee-based service. Souktel aimed to charge a certain portion of graduating students nominal user fees to make Baladna sustainable business-wise for both Souktel and its partners. By partnering with mobile operators, including Jawwal, the largest national mobile phone provider, Souktel was able to offer the service to users at discounted SMS rates: $0.09 per message sent to the service. As a result, Souktel could rapidly grow a user base with high-quality candidates. Souktel’s rationale for charging users was that job seekers willing to pay for the service were likely to be more serious about their job searches and more responsible employees. Employers paid a small usage fee on a sliding scale ($50 to $200 per job post), and Souktel knew they would only be willing to if Baladna proved useful. This payment scheme was also essential for Baladna to remain sustainable after the World Bank’s commitment to funding it ended. Over time, however, it became clear that it would be challenging for the system to achieve full financial self-sufficiency. Scaling a solution like Baladna, Souktel found, required a larger market than the approximately
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 17 3 million people in the Palestinian territories at the time. Targeting a subset of that population — soon-to-be or recent university graduates and employers with entry-level hiring needs in the West Bank — further limited Baladna’s sustainability.
Outcomes and benefits. Souktel reports that Baladna’s initial match rate was BALADNA BY THE NUMBERS approximately 25 percent; that is, one of As time passed, Baladna’s high-water mark for job seekers exceeded 15,000 people, most of every four job seekers who signed up found whom were young and well educated. (80 employment or internships. This rate was percent of Baladna’s job seekers are between much better than that of traditional ages 15 and 25. All have completed secondary education, half tertiary education.) Four of 10 alternatives, like bulletin boards around core users initially reported not having jobs. By campuses or in-person job-find agencies, 2016, the World Bank review reported that which reported average match rates of 15 Baladna had 200 active registered employers, mostly medium-sized (according to the percent across a growing user base (see Palestinian Ministry of Labor, a medium-sized box). But from a more nuanced perspective, employer has more than four staff). Souktel began to produce even better returns on its investment over time, as a World Bank study reported in 2016.2 These included: More efficient job matching. Using Baladna helped both businesses and job seekers save time and money in the hiring process. Businesses estimated that recruiting costs dropped about 20 percent. The majority of job seekers reported that the primary benefit of using Baladna was saving time and saving money on travel and other typical job search costs. Instead of going door to door to share resumes without knowing whether an opening existed, job seekers could access information about existing openings directly on their phones, a strategy especially useful for rural users searching for urban employment opportunities at a distance. Breaks down traditional barriers to job search. Staff found that female users in particular valued the service: Women make up more than 30 percent of all Baladna job seekers, a share 15 percentage points higher than their standard share of the labor force nationally. That more young women associated with the target university demographic seek jobs than women overall may account for this fact, but it also indicates that Baladna’s technologies increased access to jobs for women, leading to improved labor force participation. Better paying jobs. Of those who found jobs through Baladna, the share of workers earning less than the overall average monthly earnings (around $500 per month) dropped both for men and women.
C. LESSONS LEARNED Baladna was a very early technologically enabled alternative to traditional, inefficient job search tools, and Souktel’s approach to matching job seekers and employers has evolved significantly over the past decade. Reflecting honestly on lessons from past experience
2 World Bank (2016). World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2016.
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has critically contributed to this evolution; several key lessons follow that continue to inform Souktel’s approach to other projects.
Do not underestimate the importance of human infrastructure. Where technology works well, Souktel has found, it is backed by significant human and institutional capacity. Baladna gained its greatest traction when a dedicated three-to-four person team was conducting relevant outreach, marketing, and training. This built trust with job seekers and employers alike because it provided real-time human responses to user challenges. If soon-to-be graduates had trouble navigating the system, Souktel staff helped them. Souktel also ensured that employers could find what they sought. If employers were disappointed in the quality of the resumes culled and prepared for the openings they posted, Souktel realized, those employers would not return or pay for the service. Gaining traction and trust required pursuing job seekers and employers at the same time; to convince job seekers to use Baladna, Souktel had to demonstrate that employers were using it, and vice versa. After World Bank funding ended, Souktel kept Baladna operational even as Jobs.ps became the more popular local resource. At the same time, however, Souktel broadened its focus to create a business model that could be scaled more rapidly: Rather than directly operating job-matching services in multiple locations, Souktel concentrated on building software-as-a-service job-matching platforms that could be cloud-hosted and operated in any country, typically by USAID economic growth projects, national mobile networks, and local businesses or NGOs. In Somalia, for example, Souktel designed a customizable job-matching platform for a USAID project to support youth and economic growth. Souktel then collaborated with the project’s implementer to identify a local organization, Shaqodoon, to assume responsibility for the platform’s operations from the outset with dedicated staff to “pound the pavement” and recruit job seekers and employers. Stronger match rates than traditional alternatives were the result — 35 to 40 percent for either short-term or long-term jobs.
The limits of a small market. As a business, Souktel aims to grow. With a limited potential pool of users in the West Bank, Souktel soon recognized the need to diversify and, based on its experience with Baladna, adjusted its business model. Souktel continues to maintain Baladna, but other companies — such as Jobs.ps and, more recently, Microsoft and Silatech’s Ta3mal — have entered the job-matching market since Baladna. Although the ability to choose between different job-matching services benefits job seekers and employers, the size of these services remains limited. Jobs.ps, for example, is made up of its founder and a small handful of entry-level staff. Souktel, on the other hand, has a much larger staff and works in more than 20 countries. Souktel understood that, to grow, it would have to offer a range of services, not just a pre-developed solution like Baladna to Palestinians. Additionally, Souktel realized that different countries have different markets. For a Baladna-type product — that is, a technology-enabled job- matching service — to succeed in a given country, it would need to be compatible with that country’s realities on the ground. Simply presenting a software solution to a country without incorporating the country’s context into the software’s design or assessment process would doom the software to fall short. Souktel therefore does not merely present solutions; it tailors solutions to specific contexts based on assessments
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 19 of them, and its solutions include ongoing support. It designs pilots and rollouts with SOUKTEL DESIGN 2.0 the understanding that they will need to be After its early Baladna work, Souktel attracted a great deal of interest from implementing adapted and provides coaching to support partners and donors in prepackaged job- the human infrastructure that operates the matching or other ICT4D solutions. Over company’s solutions. time, it became clear that focusing on offering these solutions was unnecessarily risky. Souktel now emphasizes a strong design Use technology that reflects user needs and process that revolves around users and local evolves over time. Souktel’s evolved HCD stakeholders and does not predetermine solutions’ technological specifications. This process (see box) has enabled it to produce process allows donors or implementing effective solutions on several occasions. For partners to make better decisions early in a example, although Souktel had proposed to project about whether a single technological product is needed or other existing parts of a design an SMS job-matching system for a sector’s landscape should be strengthened. USAID workforce project in Jordan, after Important parts of the process include: Souktel staff arrived in Jordan for a design An in-depth assessment team that holds assessment, it discovered that few youth still initial discussions with partners and clients used that technology. Instead they relied on what is required and possible given the budget almost exclusively on other applications like Focus groups of users that gauge users’ hard- WhatsApp and Facebook. Souktel, therefore, and software preferences, allow time to designed a custom solution for the project observe how individual users interact with mobile phones, and include questions that that leveraged the communication channels draw out the challenges marginalized groups most popular among local youth. In other face, like literacy issues countries, like Rwanda, Souktel found that Co-design workshops with users and clients, SMS technology is still best way to reach revisiting initial discussions on staffing, budget, and sustainability considerations target youth. Souktel is keenly aware that Prototyping, including sharing drafts at technological trends and needs change over regular intervals with clients and users to time. In Algeria and Egypt, Souktel platforms obtain their feedback Launch, moving from “soft” or “beta” launch, use chatbots to conduct conversations with with heightened user feedback, to full launch, prospective job seekers via SMS, WhatsApp, with training of client and stakeholder staff and Facebook Messenger. These cutting-edge Check-ins at regular intervals, ideally at platforms are immediately responsive — Months 1, 3, and 6 even at night and on weekends — because they are fully automated. This responsiveness builds trust in the job-matching system and encourages user uptake.
Recognize the power of incentives. Souktel’s team understands that the incentives associated with technological tools drive their success or failure. In Baladna’s early days, for example, Souktel found it much harder to convince businesses to use the technology than students. Students searching for jobs could afford to cast a wide net. Businesses, on the other hand, had to manage their searches efficiently and could not afford to take as many chances. The message that resonated with employers, Souktel discovered, was one that emphasized the considerable time savings that a tech-based system could afford employers. This message is especially relevant in the Middle East, where employers often use newspaper ads to recruit staff, a firehose approach that leads to construction workers applying for healthcare jobs. But different incentives appeal to different potential users or partners. When approaching mobile operators, like Jawwal in
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Palestine and Tigo in Rwanda, Souktel found that value propositions about products (e.g., their ability to bundle job-matching services with other relevant services) had to appeal to the mobile networks’ particular business needs to retain customers or reach new customer segments (e.g., economically marginalized rural users).
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 21 CASE STUDY 2 CISCO’S NETACAD AND JORDAN UN WOMEN’S E- QUALITY
Since 1999, Jordan has targeted the ICT industry for growth and expansion, recognizing its potential to propel economic growth and generate jobs across a variety of sectors. The government launched a series of national strategies and reforms, including building a workforce to buttress ICT-related job growth and overcome impediments to the industry’s expansion. Although these efforts generated more ICT jobs in Jordan, like in many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, men made up nearly 90 percent of its related workforce. A USAID-funded initiative implemented by UN Women called E- Quality played a critical role in changing this dynamic over the subsequent years, helping raise women’s low participation rates in the ICT workforce from just 12 percent in 2002 to more than 30 percent in 20133. The initiative also led directly to jobs for thousands of young Jordanian men and women.
A. SYNOPSIS E-Quality, supported by a series of USAID grants over 10 years (2004 to 2014) and CISCO BY THE NUMBERS cost-share from UN Women, allowed Cisco is a major force in communications and networking; it provides products ranging from Jordan to tap into Cisco Systems’ NetAcad routers and Ethernet switches to enterprise model to train and potentially certify IP connectivity software and services. A leader in networking engineers to support and six of seven major market segments (servers, switches and routers, network security, service the hardware and software that wireless local area network, voice systems, businesses have increasingly adopted over telepresence, and unified communications the last fifteen years. Although NetAcad was apps), Cisco boasts a 33 percent market share across these segments. Cisco’s market share a relatively new CSR initiative, Cisco was has hovered between 60 and 75 percent in the one of the few industry leaders in switch and router market, the market most networking devices. Today, Cisco is virtually relevant to NetAcad. In comparison, Cisco’s competitors all have market shares in the ubiquitous (see box). As the entire ICT single digits in this market. Because the industry has expanded over the past two majority of businesses around the globe use decades, Cisco and NetAcad have grown Cisco products, there is a high demand for the skills necessary to service those products. with it. NetAcad has been instrumental in building the local labor force that Cisco’s clients need and in reinforcing the industry as a whole. In the process, NetAcad has established partnerships with USAID and other donors in more than 40 countries and trained more than 1 million networking engineers. NetAcad has focused on Jordan since E-Quality began there, and the factors behind NetAcad and E-Quality’s (in Jordan, NetAcad and E-Quality are virtually synonymous) success there can productively inform technology partnerships in workforce development efforts worldwide. The following features helped define the program:
3 Jordanian Women in the ICT Space. (2014). Amman, Jordan: UN Women. Retrieved from http://jordan.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2014/6/jordanian-women-in-the-ict-space#view.
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A university hub structure. Exhibit 5. Jordan NetAcad Relationships NetAcad training academies are often housed at universities’ computer science or engineering departments or at vocational training institutes. Although E- Quality initially partnered with Al Balqa Applied University to coordinate and lead a group of local academies, Princess Sumaya University for Technology at Jordan University (PSUT) took over Al Balqa’s role as E- Quality’s hub for Jordan in 2006 (see Exhibit 5). PSUT recognized the value the initiative had for its students and those of its affiliated universities. This network of universities now collaborates to host training of trainers and rollout training based on student demand. Computer science or other engineering-related departments usually house the NetAcad program. PSUT also hosts a trust to support graduate internships.
Shared costs. Costs are shared across different partners and stakeholders. For example, Cisco provides significantly discounted lab equipment for purchase to the academies. Students also pay for the courses, which may lead to official Cisco certifications that enhance the students’ competitiveness on the job market. In Jordan, these costs varied by academy based on the number of hours in a course. At PSUT, for example, CCNA certification course is 200 hours long and costs 300 JOD, whereas at other universities, the same course is between 120 and 140 hours and approximately 150 JOD. In the final phase of the project and after it ended, the trust provided additional means to defray these costs.
B. ORGANIZATIONAL APPROACH AND IMPACT Use targeted subsidies to gain traction. Through E-Quality, NetAcad provided subsidies for women to decrease barriers to their participation. Initially, PSUT found it difficult to find female students interested in NetAcad. Almost no women enrolled in the program in the first year or two. When subsidies that covered between 80 and 100 percent of the program’s cost for women were introduced, however, the number of women who enrolled in it drastically increased. In fact, almost all the program’s participants were women. The program scaled back the subsidies, and the male-to-female ratio of students became more even. Similarly, to support graduates in their job searches, E-Quality tapped into other initiatives, such as one implemented by the Jordanian Engineers Association. Every year, the association subsidized a portion of 200 graduates’ salary costs for six months. In the final phase, E-Quality and the association also worked through a trust to subsidize six-month internships for graduates and embed sustainability
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 23 in the overall operation. PSUT manages this trust in partnership with the Ministries of ICT and Labor, which stood at 15,000 JOD at the end of the project. Besides sustaining the internship program, this mechanism helps defray the costs of train-the-trainer events, courses for women pursuing NetAcad certification, and the annual National Technology Parade.
Increased focus on job placement. Initially, PSUT and the local academies focused on promoting equitable participation and increasing the number of those enrolled in training, not necessarily helping students secure employment as they transitioned to the workforce. But from the beginning, the students were focused on finding jobs. As trainees found jobs, often better jobs than their peers who had not taken NetAcad courses, the program’s reputation grew, as did the demand for its courses. After 2011, PSUT and others began to dedicate increasing attention and resources to assisting students with the job search. PSUT and its lead coordinator, Ashraf Sabha, had noticed that companies searching for candidates for ICT jobs often reached out to him, and he was able to connect these companies with high-performing students from NetAcad. Although Mr. Sabha’s long tenure in this role helped make NetAcad the valued job- matching resource it is, companies continue to consult NetAcad when searching for qualified candidates. Estarta, for example, regularly requests CVs from NetAcad faculty at the University of Jordan.
Outcomes and benefits. When E-Quality began, its chief goal was to increase women’s participation in the labor force, but placing both men and women in jobs was a one of the program’s key outcomes. In its final phase, NetAcad placed at least 500 students in jobs over two years. Interviews with NetAcad faculty suggested additional positive outcomes. At the University of Jordan, for example, faculty note that although job placement rates are not necessarily higher for NetAcad graduates than others engineering graduates, the quality of the jobs NetAcad graduates secure is better; the jobs have higher starting salaries (often 500 JOD per month instead of 400 JOD) and offer more opportunities for rapid promotion. One student, for example, was hired at 600 JOD per month. Nine months later, this person was earning 1500 JOD per month at another company, Palo Alto in Amsterdam. Recent NetAcad hires at Estarta shared that they earn 500 JOD extra per month because of their CCNA certification. Others note that their companies advertise specifically for NetAcad graduates because of the program’s reputation. These stories and others from recent graduates reinforce the program’s reputation and help maintain its appeal.
C. LESSONS LEARNED Focus on each party’s core interests. The success of E-Quality’s partnerships and programmatic outcomes depended on a confluence of interests. Cisco needed to prepare a workforce. As more people used its networking products, the demand for skilled, cost-effective labor (i.e., Jordanian talent, not high-priced international staff) to service these products was growing.
Universities needed to prepare their students for a 21st-century job market and increase their competitiveness. Although some initially saw it as a way to obtain
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discount lab equipment (e.g., routers, cables, cards, and switches), the growing demand for NetAcad courses made it apparent that academies could also be a revenue source, generating student fees that helped make the academies self-sustaining. (Half of PSUT’s NetAcad tuition covers the cost of the venue; the other half is split to cover instructors’ salaries and reinvestments in the lab.)
Students needed to distinguish themselves in the job market. NetAcad helped them do so with certifications and deeper practical knowledge of and experience in potential employers’ networks. The public was also supportive of the ICT industry’s needs, which made it easier for NetAcad to find sustainable ways (e.g., the government’s support for the internship trust) to subsidize enrollment and placement efforts. Clear MoUs helped ensure that maintaining the equitable participation of women and men remained a priority as well as mainstream content and curricula beyond NetAcad in universities.
Begin with market demand for skills. In the past, a network engineer might have been considered a luxury. Now a network engineer, with a skillset in increasing demand, is virtually a necessity. In the Middle East, the gap between the demand for and supply of IP networking professionals is wide: In 2016, it was between 30 and 40 percent in most countries, including Jordan, according to the Global Talent Competitiveness Index4. The Department of Statistics reports that the number of new ICT jobs in Jordan has fluctuated between 2,000 and 5,000 annually. The country’s university ICT programs produce about 6,000 graduates per year, but these graduates are positioned to work across the Middle East or further afield. Although the ICT sector’s growth as a whole has slowed in Jordan (job growth stagnated after the financial crisis), the trend line in the networking subsector is clearly positive and stable, as placement rates for NetAcad graduates suggest.
E-Quality and its partners were able to position the program and its target population for success by aligning training with a key market opportunity for new graduates. As the increasing willingness of students to pay for the NetAcad courses attests, attending to the labor market’s real, tangible demands allowed E-Quality to achieve its goal and flourish. NetAcad graduates secured desirable jobs, jobs often better than those their peers without NetAcad training got. As NetAcad graduates’ success stories traveled by word of mouth, esteem for the program grew. Increasing enrollment, in turn, compelled administrators to expand course offerings.
4 Yoo, T.; Pepper, R.; and Garrity, J. (2014).“Talent Growth as an Equaliser: A View from the ICT Industry.” The Global Talent Competitiveness Index, Eds. Bruno Lavin and Paul Evans. Singapore: INSEAD. Retrieved from http://www.adecco.com/en-US/Industry-Insights/Documents/gtci-report-2014.pdf.
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 25 CASE STUDY 3 MICROSOFT’S TA3MAL (YOUTHWORKS)
Job-matching websites in the Middle East have taken many forms, from small operations focused on certain markets — like Jobs.ps, a basic online job board in the West Bank — to medium and large recruiting operations — like Bayt.com, which targets the entire region. In most countries, employers surveyed in workforce development assessments consistently complain that university education is highly theoretical and that graduates lack the real-world experience and the right mix of hard and soft skills needed to succeed in the workplace. To fill this void, the Qatar-based foundation Silatech partnered with Microsoft Citizenship and launched the Ta3mal online employability portal (also known as YouthWorks) to fill this void in 2012. The portal provided a combined solution to employers and job seekers via free, online skills training modules, job-matching services, and career guidance. Since then, the portal has also been introduced in several other Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Palestine. These initiatives offer a range of lessons grounded in practical, recent experience, highlighting the challenges and trade- offs implementers face in pursuing an approach to youth unemployment that hinges on partnership between large organizations that seek scale and access to reach large numbers of a given target population. This case study summarizes the core lessons learned across Ta3mal initiatives that are most relevant to this technical guide. For more detailed information, please see the USAID/Iraq evaluation of the Foras project and the USAID/Middle East AMEG project’s final report on the Lebanon initiative.
A. SYNOPSIS The ability of the Ta3mal platform to respond VARIABLES OF TA3MAL comprehensively to the youth unemployment Below are key questions to ask when challenge depended on how key interrelated considering a platform like Ta3mal. variables played out in different country contexts Resources. What is the level of human and (see box). In countries like Iraq and Egypt, where financial investment available for rolling out the platform has seen relative success, the level of the platform? Ta3mal works best alongside investment has been substantial, with sizeable significant donor or government investment in human infrastructure and career centers teams dedicated to rolling out the platform, or job placement agencies, as in Egypt and building a user base, and resolving challenges. In Iraq. Iraq, USAID’s Foras project dedicated significant Responsiveness. Are technological fixes to user issues (those of job seekers and personalized attention to the Ta3mal platform via employers) dealt with quickly and smoothly? project staff and a set of job placement agencies. In Especially in the early days of a rollout, doing so, Foras helped young people find jobs and addressing such issues promptly and effectively is necessary to build trust and enhanced the platform’s public profile, attracting traction with a sizeable user base. multiple offers to buy the platform. In Egypt, Local landscape. How necessary is a new job- government career centers and a United Nations match and training platform given existing local options? Would it make more sense to Development Programme (UNDP) team provide strengthen local job-search and employer similar support to the program, facilitating its in- hiring mechanisms with existing user bases?
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country operation. In other countries, however, tentative pilot investments, diffuse sets of partnerships, and a highly centralized platform with slow customer service have led to greater operational challenges or left it floundering among different local competitors.
B. ORGANIZATIONAL APPROACH AND EVOLUTION Operationalizing the Ta3mal portal has taken different forms in different countries, and the success of its operationalization in them has varied. In general, Silatech and Microsoft’s approach is to incorporate into these efforts the flexibility that practitioners have long recognized as fundamental to the success of any workforce effort. For example, to ensure local ownership of the platform and allow for its expansion, the partnership collaborates with local NGOs, community groups, and educational institutions to host training as well as grow and service the portal’s user base in each country.
Provide flexibility in partnership design. Because the portal is prefabricated, the partnership structure — its roles, responsibilities, funding, and type of partners — can vary from country to country depending on funding and the stakeholder landscape. In Egypt, where Microsoft’s investment was roughly $200,000 per year, the Ministry of Youth built out a network of career centers with associated training, career guidance staff, and a call center to facilitate a highly personalized approach to helping youth find jobs. The UNDP supported these centers by providing a monitoring and evaluation team. In Lebanon, a USAID AMEG pilot, which had much more limited funding, used a train-the-trainers model to build the capacity of existing educational institutions and NGOs to provide career guidance. These institutions and NGOs relied on the portal as their principal means of engaging youth looking for jobs and employers.
Blend job-match training with soft skills training. What defines the Ta3mal portal is its ability TRAINING IN TA3MAL to function as a one-stop-shop for job One challenge for youth interested in Ta3mal placement and associated soft-skills training online training was knowing how to choose from the variety of courses on the platform. at no cost. Ta3mal incorporates Silatech’s Microsoft initially allowed partners to add any career questionnaire and guidance to help training content they desired, but students had youth consider the jobs that best suit them no way of knowing the quality of the many courses they could choose from. It was in addition to Silatech’s hundreds of private difficult for them to determine whether sector skills training modules. Ta3mal has particular courses were worth taking. now streamlined its course offerings (see Microsoft later teamed with Alison Online Training to provide a more streamlined box). But as Ta3mal built up its content for collection of training courses. These courses, the first several years, it accepted all however, are not customized to the local Silatech’s modules and left them uncurated, context or labor market needs. Furthermore, although the site is somewhat functional in which made it challenging for job seekers to Arabic and French, it offers nearly all its know which to use. Consequently, Ta3mal courses only in English. faced a challenge similar to that which massive online open courses (more commonly referred to as MOOCs) face: a relatively
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 27 low percentage of job seekers with clear self-direction who are willing to wade through unvetted content without serious investment in trainers or professional guidance.
Centralized control of technology. Initially, Microsoft described the Ta3mal software as an open source platform that could be customized to local needs. Prior to the Lebanon pilot with AMEG, Lebanese IT firm Netways partnered with Microsoft to identify and fix minor bugs in the software and make customizations to the Lebanon Ta3mal platform. However, as Microsoft brought roughly 20 more countries online to use the platform during the AMEG pilot, the company decided to standardize and centralize the software on a single hosting site. All requests for fixes, updates, and customization must go through Microsoft’s Corporate Citizenship Office in Egypt. This decision has ultimately created a major bottleneck; Microsoft’s Citizenship Office is now managing IT requests for more than 20 countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
As requests for support from multiple SUGGESTIONS FROM SHAREK countries grew, Microsoft’s ability to respond to and address bugs and make Although the most recent update on the YouthWorks/Ta3mal platform is somewhat technological updates slowed to a crawl promising, local implementers, like Sharek in because Microsoft’s resources to respond Palestine, still report that YouthWorks/Ta3mal to bugs and enhance the software were is challenging for people to use. Perhaps more importantly, the recommendations of local limited. In addition, Microsoft’s partnerships implementers — those closest to the portal’s with the job portal Bayt.com and Ta3mal’s users — go unheeded. The platform is, co-founder Silatech require those therefore, vulnerable to losing the trust of employers and job seekers. In May 2017, ideas organizations make the appropriate to address these problems included: adjustments to the software, worsening the Make the registration through Facebook, bottleneck. For example, when AMEG Twitter, and WindowsLive functions called to Microsoft’s attention that a failure workable. in the integration of the Ta3mal portal with Notify users of the most recent job postings with daily or weekly email alerts. the Bayt.com portal was preventing new Use popup ads to prompt already registered employers and users from registering on users to update their CVs. the Ta3mal site and was causing them to Reduce unnecessary sections for job seekers to fill out when completing CVs, like sections register and post jobs inadvertently on the on target jobs and skills. Bayt.com platform, Microsoft, Silatech, and Improve portal speed, since a slow speed Bayt.com took more than six months to turns off many youth. acknowledge and address the issue. In the Provide a means to measure the number of youth placed in jobs, since helping youth meantime, employers and users utilized secure employment is a primary goal of local social media or other local job portals (e.g., implementers and often a donor HireLebanese.com and Wamseet) to post requirement. jobs and find candidates. Although Microsoft has launched an updated version of Ta3mal, many of its issues persist, as conversations with Sharek, the Palestinian NGO currently responsible for Ta3mal in the West Bank confirm (see box). Ta3mal’s lack of responsiveness to job seekers and employers regularly compromises the traction local implementers have gained with the user base. These challenges also increase other core limitations of the technology,
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including its lack of reporting on key usage information for monitoring and evaluation (e.g., the number of youth completing training or finding jobs via the platform).
C. LESSONS LEARNED If you simply build it, they may not come. The Ta3mal team in Egypt shared that a portal must have a robust social media presence to convince youth and employers to use it. The AMEG team applied this lesson in Lebanon with its local partner Netways, establishing Facebook and LinkedIn sites for Ta3mal to help raise awareness of it, share job postings, publicize events, and promote training opportunities. By the pilot’s end, users had shared Ta3mal social media posts more than 1.6 million times. To gain this traction, however, AMEG and Netways had to use career fairs and conferences to promote Ta3mal to employers as well as kiosks at universities to build students’ awareness of Ta3mal and get new youth to sign up for its services. These social media and face-to-face outreach efforts were crucial in building the base of employers and youth using Ta3mal. In this respect, those promoting Ta3mal had an experience similar to Souktel’s experience of promoting Baladna in Palestine a decade earlier. By the pilot’s end, Facebook and LinkedIn were more popular than the portal itself; youth and employers used these social media sites more often than Ta3mal. As the Iraq Foras project found, posting on social media that job seekers already use, not on the Ta3mal platform itself, became the best way to notify potential candidates of job openings.
Technology itself is not a magic bullet. The AMEG team learned from the Ta3mal teams in Egypt and Iraq that significant personalized attention is required to ensure that employers can connect with a steady stream of qualified candidates with attractive resumes. Youth need coaching on how to display their experience on their resumes, write effective cover letters, and identify positions in which they might be interested. In addition, they need counseling on which skills to build to become more attractive to employers in their field of choice. On the flip side, employers need coaching on how to draft job descriptions that clearly list required and desired qualifications so only relevant candidates will apply. The Ta3mal portal itself cannot provide such coaching. People and organizations with the human and financial resources to provide this coaching are necessary to ensure the portal is valuable to employers and job seekers. In Egypt, the Ministry of Youth plays this role. In Iraq, the USAID Foras project provided this support until the project ended. In Lebanon, AMEG attempted to build this capacity within existing organizations already engaged in youth employability initiatives so those organizations could continue to support youth and employers after the short lifetime of the activity. AMEG and Netways, however, provided direct additional support at the activity’s outset to ensure some degree of mentoring was available to employers and youth while AMEG trained these organizations.
Carefully consider the incentives of large organizational partners. Ta3mal initially started organically within Microsoft, with an Egypt-based intern designing the concept for it. As the system gained traction internally, the fact that the portal was within Microsoft itself created benefits and drawbacks. As a major global corporation, Microsoft ostensibly
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT | 29 provided an outstanding way to host and service a high-quality tool that met a commonly cited challenge. In practice, however, this tool was only tangentially related to the core set of services Microsoft offered, which influenced the organization’s readiness to respond to the fixes local implementing partners — NGOs and others — requested. Although Microsoft was interested in using Ta3mal as a means to gain credibility with host-country governments that might be interested in licensing its core products, this mindset left Ta3mal internally under-resourced to address the significant functionality issues that users have cited in multiple countries. Microsoft has an incentive to offer Ta3mal, but because it is a free product and not a profit-generating one, Microsoft has less of an incentive to dedicate resources to meeting the needs of Ta3mal’s user base. Microsoft also made the business decision to centralize the servicing of Ta3mal, further diminishing response times for requested changes. That said, based on experience in Lebanon, AMEG and Netways believe there is a way for Microsoft to provide local implementers with APIs that would allow for local fixes and customization without affecting the overall source code and wreaking havoc on the central platform. Microsoft could integrate APIs into the new version of the platform it is developing. Microsoft should also create a mechanism for soliciting more regular feedback from Ta3mal implementers and partners to identify and address common issues.
Consider local options first. Rather than support a separate one-size-fits-all job-matching and training platform like Ta3mal, donors may find it more effective to team with existing local and regional job-matching boards — like HireLebanese.com or Wamseet in Lebanon and Jobs.ps in Palestine — to provide free or low-cost subscriptions or service plans to local partners working on youth employability initiatives. Donors such as USAID could also partner with local IT firms to create an online one-stop shop to guide youth to training and employability programs in their regions or municipalities. This option would likely provide more targeted and tailored services to youth in Lebanon who plan to enter the job market. Instead of creating competition with local private sector job sites, it would allow for productive collaboration with them.
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