Supporting Youth Employment in Africa by Strengthening the Capacity of AfDB and RMCs

The Project supports the Bank’s objective to accelerate the implementation of the JfYA Strategy by strengthening the Bank’s internal capacity through: a) Devising, testing and implementing a Jobs Marker as a main anchor of employment-related aspects of Bank operations in Regional Member Countries (RMCs) to scale employment outcomes; and b) Strengthening the capacity of task managers and investment officers in terms of including employment considerations into the projects they work on and to better engage and guide RMCs on approaches to scale up employment outcomes of investment operations. The aim is to create a mechanism for systematically identifying projects across sectors, which have significant employment effects, and ensuring that they have access to sufficient support to realize their employment potential. This will also help the Bank improve the strategic allocation of its resources, making sure that every dollar spent delivers the greatest development value for Africa’s peoples. The Project will provide technical assistance for the development of the Jobs Marker and its testing across a representative selection of projects before its subsequent roll out to other RMCs and therefore the whole Bank portfolio. The introduction of the Jobs Marker will be accompanied by a training programme, an easy to use guide and user-friendly tools for appraisal, monitoring and reporting. It will be critical to design the Jobs Marker in such a manner that it is complementary, or where necessary integrated with the existing systems. This will enable it to, on the one hand, avoid duplication, but on the other hand also ensure that the inclusion of the Jobs Marker does not unnecessarily burden the project preparation and appraisal phases. It is also important that in designing the Jobs Marker, the ILO takes into account the experiences with introducing these other systems, so that those lessons can be incorporated into both the design and roll-out of the Jobs Marker. Some important lessons and observations from the experience with these other systems which will be considered in the design of the Jobs Marker are: - Buy-in: Overall buy-in into the system is essential and is required at all levels including the board, task managers and RMCs. - Capacity building: specific efforts are required to ensure that all staff who are expected to work with the Jobs Maker understand it, its goals and how to apply it. - Complementary tools: in addition to the Marker, complementary tools and guides are required to support the proper application of the Jobs Marker, including tools to help assessing and estimating impacts on jobs. - Integration into monitoring practices is required to ensure that the intended results from the Jobs Marker are actually monitored and can be reported upon. - Systems for feedback from evaluation and assessment results so as to ensure that at the end of each funded project, the relevant results are systematically fed back to the Jobs Marker to be able to assess the actual impacts on jobs but also continuously improve the Jobs Marker. - Evaluability of the Jobs Marker so that its use and effect can be evaluated and inform revisions and improvements.

Project symbol

RAF/21/09/BAD

Admin unit

RO-Africa

Start date

06/12/2021

End date

31/12/2024

Total allocation

999997

Total expenditure

Status

Active

996132

Development Partners

African Development Bank

Country/Countries

Africa - regional

Outcomes

Outcome 3: Full and productive employment for just transitions