Effect of Youth in Action on Work Readiness and Socioeconomic Outcomes: Findings from Egypt

About 89 million youth between the ages of 12-24 are part of a growing cohort of out-of-school youth, approximately half of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa. While many of these youth aspire to be active members of their community, many out-of-school rural youth face limited formal socioeconomic opportunities, and are often unable to access systems and structures to help their aspirations.

This situation is especially true for Egypt. Egypt has a very young population; in 2012, 62% of the population was younger than 29 years. Additionally, the unemployment rate among youth between the ages of 15-24 was 30%.

In response to the high rate of youth unemployment, the Youth in Action (YiA) program was implemented by Save the Children in partnership with Mastercard Foundation. The goal of YiA is to improve the socioeconomic status of around 40,000 out-of-school young people (12-18 years), both girls and boys, in rural Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda.

The Program Outcome Study (POS) covered in this report was designed to understand how youth work readiness (financial literacy, work support and resources, academic skills and transferable skills) might change for a sample of youth over the YiA-program period and how those changes might impact socioeconomic outcomes (income earning status, adequate savings, credit access). It was designed as a pre-post study with no control or comparison group.