Evidence of non-economic indicators as markers of success for youth in youth employability programs
- Emma Anderson
Abstract
Evaluation studies of youth employment programs prioritize employment and earnings outcomes and use these indicators to determine what labor market interventions are most successful. Evidence from pre and post data of a cluster randomized controlled longitudinal study, consisting of 1 892 youth between 18 and 25 years who participated in Youth Employability Programs (YEPs) in South Africa, confirms the importance of the inclusion of non-economic indicators to measure success for youth. This study provides evidence that non-economic markers of success such as job-search resilience, self-esteem, self-efficacy and future orientation are potentially important in the transition to employment in the longer term and points to the need for more evaluations that use these markers to predict youth’s success in employment. The findings further suggest that these non-economic outcomes, which were conceptualized as intermediary outcomes, can influence how young people manage the increasingly protracted and difficult transition to work. The study enlarges our understanding of the non-linear and protracted pathways of youth transitions to work in a development context, and how to best support youth in this transition period. These findings have implications for rethinking YEP evaluation outcomes that could lead to adaptive programming and management of interventions.
1. Introduction
Youth unemployment is a critical global challenge with many countries facing increasing levels of unemployment of young people (International Labor Organisation (ILO) 2017). While there has been some recovery in youth unemployment since the global economic crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic and resultant economic downturn are likely to further intensify youth unemployment. The challenge is particularly acute for middle-income countries such as South Africa that are faced with already high rates of poverty and inequality, and are undergoing structural economic, technological, and social changes. In addition, high youth unemployment is due to low job growth particularly in sectors that do not demand high levels of skills. This has resulted in a lack of access to the labor market for young people with low levels of skills resulting from poor quality education. In South Africa, youth unemployment (broadly defined to include discouraged work seekers) for 15 to 24 year olds is 67% and coincides with race, gender, and spatial divides (Statistics South Africa 2019a). Finding evidence-based solutions to facilitate young people’s transition to employment and to support their job-search resilience in contexts of high structural unemployment is therefore an urgent priority.
Globally, interest in Active Labor Market Policies (ALMPs) has been growing. In Middle and Lower-Income country contexts a variety of such interventions are delivered by public, private and third sector organizations (African Development Bank, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations Development Program & United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ADB, OECD, UNDP & UNECA) 2012). ALMPs operate in three domains (ADB et al. 2012). First are supply side interventions such as skills training and educational system reforms. Second are intermediation services – employment services that attempt to improve labor market efficiency and connections or provide entrepreneurship support. Third are demand side interventions such as direct job creation, subsidized employment programs, and public employment schemes. There is a bias toward supply side interventions and intermediation services with lower levels of investment in demand side strategies (ADB et al. 2012). In this article we focus on these interventions, specifically youth training and placement programs, which we refer to as youth employability programs (YEPs). In this article we conceptualize YEPs first as potential settings or “critical delivery systems” providing nurturing and empowering resources, “[learning] experiences, supports and opportunities”. Second, YEPs are communities of young people who share a common purpose and who agree to collaborate to enhance their work seeking capacities. Finally, YEPs focus mainly on the supply side of the labor market such as developing knowledge, skills and personal characteristics that could unlock some of the barriers they face in labor market participation.
Evaluation studies of YEPs tend to prioritize labor market outcomes such as employment and earnings (Egdell & McQuaid, 2016) with a focus on what works to best deliver these outcomes (Kluve et al. 2019). This is a new area of research in South Africa and in Sub-Saharan Africa (Kluve et al. 2019). Local evaluations rely more on participant perceptions of program quality rather than on rigorous assessments of impact. There is very little evidence from rigorous studies that use non-economic indicators of success for youth to understand what shifts youth’s experience in the labor market to improve their resilience and help them to success. This study addresses this knowledge gap and contributes to providing evidence from a cluster randomized controlled study in South Africa that in addition to economic indicators of success uses non-economic indicators as markers to understand YEPs role in supporting youth transitions to work in South Africa.
The starting point for the study is that youth transitions to work are non-linear and protracted (Furlong et al. 2017). Therefore, instead of focusing on longer-term outcomes relating to employment and earnings, a more comprehensive evaluation approach was adopted, informed by a Positive Youth Development (PYD) approach (Benson et al. 2007). Intermediate outcomes, such as job-search resilience defined as continued efforts to look for work (positive outcome) despite repeated failures in securing employment (setbacks) (drawing on Zolkoski & Bullock (2012)), work-search behaviors, and personal characteristics, are important to track as these could provide new insight into how young people manage the transition and how they might be best supported. This is an important gap in our knowledge in low and middle-income countries (Fox & Kaul 2018). As such the aim of the current study was to evaluate the effects of eight YEPs on non-economic indicators including job search resilience, self-efficacy, self-esteem and future orientation. Second, to assess whether a financial capability intervention added to these YEPs has any effect on these outcomes. Two hypotheses were tested. Hypothesis one contends that improvements in intermediate and short-term outcomes such as self-efficacy, self-esteem, future orientation, job search resilience and efficacy are likely to be achieved following participation in a youth employment program (YEP). Hypothesis two holds that adding a financial capability intervention to existing YEPs may improve these short and intermediate outcomes.
2. Youth employment context in South Africa
Youth transitions in the post-war years in industrial societies were conceived of as linear, with young people moving fairly seamlessly from school to education and training and into work over short time periods (Furlong et al. 2017). To support those who did not make this transition smoothly, ALMPs were devised to connect youth with jobs through public employment services, training schemes and employment subsidies, complemented by social protection policies.
The ALMP picture is somewhat different in middle-income countries, owing to different labor markets. Countries are faced with a large and growing rate of youth unemployment (ADB et al. 2012) with underlying causes that include expanding youth populations, with new entrants to the labor market outpacing the number of jobs created (ILO, 2019) as well as the impact of technology, digitization of economies and automation resulting in demand for higher skills levels (World Bank 2019). This limits employment prospects for young people, particularly those from poor socio-economic backgrounds with limited skills, who are increasingly excluded from the labor market (Butler-Adams 2018). Critical levels of youth unemployment in such contexts have spawned a range of ALMPs across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors (ADB et al. 2012), many of which focus on skills development.
It is now widely acknowledged that young people’s transitions to the labor market, even in developed country contexts, are more protracted and that youth face the consequences of deeply rooted labor insecurity (Furlong et al. 2017). However, in most developed country contexts young people will make a successful transition, with those who do not being confined to relatively small, particularly vulnerable or at risk groups (Sanders et al. 2020). In contrast, in developing country contexts, widespread poverty means that large proportions of the youth population face difficulties with finding work. In South Africa evidence shows that young people follow staggered transitions to and through the labor market engaging in various forms of short-term work, periods of discouragement, and times of participation in training (Mlatsheni & Ranchhod, 2017). The transition of disadvantaged young Black youth to the labor market is particularly complex and overlaid with historical disadvantage due to the country’s apartheid legacy (De Lannoy, Frame and Leibbrandt, 2015). While some do manage to transition to work, only 40% of young people are employed by 24 years of age (Mlatsheni & Ranchhod, 2017), with many of these jobs being short-term in nature.
In developed countries, increased financial assets are associated with improved access to education and training (Destin & Oyserman 2009). Access to a savings account for children was found to be a strong predictor of college attendance in later years (Elliott & Sherraden, 2013). Similarly a review study showed that savings behavior is associated with better school achievements in Uganda, Kenya and Ghana (Chowa, Ansong, & Masa, 2010). In developing countries a lack of access to financial assets such as savings, borrowing and knowledge of financial literacy affects the ability to manage risk (Kunt et al. 2015). While access to financial services is a predictor of well-being, only a quarter of poor households in South Africa have access to financial services due to high bank charges and mistrust in formal banking services (Ikdal et al. 2017). Limited research exists of the financial capabilities of youth in South Africa and of its role in the employment trajectories of young people.
6. Findings
6.1. Descriptives
Participants largely come from income poor households where food insecurity is a challenge. The mean monthly income for the households in which participants reside was $202,72 and $204 for treatment and control respectively (shown in Table 1 above), which places them in households below the lower-bound poverty line for South Africa (Statistics South Africa 2019b). These low-income levels in part explain why most young people in the sample lived in households that had high levels of food insecurity. In the study we used the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (Coates et al. 2007). Over half of the respondents came from households that were severely food insecure. A further 20% are moderately food insecure.
Despite their socio-economic situation, the majority of youth in the programs (90.5%) attained at least their school completion certificate and a very small minority (6% for control and 8% for treatment as per Table 1 above) had pursued post-secondary education. This is significantly higher than the national figures (Isdale et al. 2016). This discrepancy is due to the eligibility criteria of most of the YEPs requiring a matric certificate1. Despite overcoming severe poverty to achieve these education outcomes, across the sample average duration of unemployment was over 13 months (12.9 months for control and 13.5 months for treatment), meaning that they were chronically unemployed (defined as being unemployed for longer than one year) at the time of entering the YEPs.
The findings ... provide evidence that participants emerge from these programs with sustained positive self-efficacy and self-esteem and that exposure to the financial capability intervention supports improved self-efficacy and self-esteem We also see that young people seem to improve their work search behavior (behavioral competence) and job-search resilience (measured by reduced discouragement levels) indicating that the intervention i.e. financial capability intervention worked to improve the non-economic outcomes. Taken together, these findings suggest that YEPs have a role to play in fostering some non-economic outcomes and that the financial capability intervention has particularly important effects on personal/ individual level outcomes.
7. Discussion
An alternative to mainstream approaches in evaluating YEPs was devised to take account of the protracted and staggered nature of transitions to work. By evaluating a set of intermediate and short-term outcomes of YEPs, much was learnt about the individual level changes that occurred among the participants at entry and termination of the programs. Often these changes are overlooked because of the focus on longer term employment and earnings as indicators of program efficacy and of their role in influencing the longer-term outcomes of YEPs.
The approach appears to be a useful one in rethinking future programming and evaluation outcomes for three further reasons. First, it brings awareness of the agency and personal assets or strengths that young people bring to YEPs upon entry. Participants presented with high levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and high levels of education upon entering the program despite their social and economic disadvantage. Previous local studies show that youth express high levels of optimism about the future despite difficult circumstances (Kamper & Badenhorst 2010). These personal characteristics and assets need to be acknowledged in program development, delivery and in monitoring and evaluation.
Second, the apparent resilience in work-search and the reduction in discouragement over the course of the program may point to the value of engaging young people in such programs, even where employment is unlikely in the short-term at least. YEPs appear to provide young people with the knowledge and skills to improve job search behavior, and the confidence to continue looking for work. In this way, YEPs serve an important purpose in promoting and maintaining their connection with formal and informal labor markets opportunities as four out of ten South African youth do find work over time (Mlatsheni & Ranchhod, 2017).
Third, investing in developing the financial assets of young people through a financial capability intervention has in this case shown positive effects on personal characteristics and might serve as a protective factor. In particular it has positive effects on both self-efficacy of participants and self-esteem amongst treatment participants as they exit the program. Multi-component programs that include a range of cognitive and non-cognitive skills, financial capabilities and that strengthen other personal attributes and networks appear to have been beneficial to the participants. This is also confirmed by international evidence (Kluve et al. 2019).
Finally, YEPs may serve to mitigate some of the barriers to work seeking for youth from disadvantaged backgrounds. They do so by strengthening their agency to navigate their way through these challenges. Despite significant structural constraints to employment growth in South Africa which is beyond their control, the findings do demonstrate that actions of youth employability programs matter to some extent, because they make a difference to the non-economic outcomes. They are therefore important interventions in a suite of strategies to reduce youth unemployment.
8. Conclusion
Evaluation studies to assess the impact of YEPs tend to focus on ‘work first’ policies (Egdell & McQuaid, 2016) and privilege employment outcomes. The study demonstrates the complexity of youth transitions to work in a middle-income country with very high rates of unemployment. The findings also resonate with other international studies about the potential of ALMPs to promote youth employment, although the effects may be small and tend to be observed over a longer time period (Kluve et al., 2019, Card et al., 2018). The study goes further and shows how young people who were exposed to a YEP were able to use their agency, enhanced personal assets and knowledge and skills to navigate wider societal changes and structural unemployment. However, on their own, supply side interventions of this nature are limited and need to work together with demand side strategies to boost employment growth especially for young men and particularly women who experience significant exclusion from labor market participation.
Alternative approaches to the design and evaluation of youth employment policies and programs that better capture both economic and social measures of welfare and well-being are needed. Rethinking evaluation outcomes that measure changes at the individual level could provide important pointers for devising innovative programs that support agency, asset building, strengthen job-search resilience, and that foster personal esteem and efficacy. These may be important markers of success in the protracted transition to employment. Adaptive program and management strategies are needed to increase responsiveness of YEPs to the needs of young people in this phase of their personal development and pathways to employment, entrepreneurship and further education and training. YEPs do however need to experiment with and test new and additional program content responsive to the needs of youth with less formal education and a different personal profile compared to the cohort in this study. These early but promising results suggest that greater investments in YEPs of this nature are indicated in development contexts. They form part of critical community-level delivery systems that promote youth participation and could foster positive youth development outcomes. Multi-component programs appear to be more successful and especially when they include a financial capability. In view of the complexity of the delivery of YEPs, evaluation research also needs to shift to how best to deliver these types of programs effectively and for young people left behind with different social and educational profiles. Finally, YEPs could play an important role in early intervention and prevention of chronic social and economic exclusion of young people in development contexts.