In the race to be qualified for good jobs the starting line is jagged-some youth start further ahead than others. The best programs use data to smooth the line out.
Organizations that create youth skills training programs must tailor them using data that describes education discrepancies based on gender, urban/rural, region and wealth data.
For example, in Haiti, 28 percent of women between the ages of 23 and 27 have less than four years of schooling, compared to 21 percent of males. Skills training programs that target Haitians in their 20s should tweak their offerings to take this discrepancy into account so that they can make sure women are also receiving the skills that will change their economic status. In Haiti, 67 percent of the poorest quintile have received less than four years of schooling, while only six percent of the richest quintile received so little. The major discrepancies in education were recently classified in an interactive database through the Education for All's "World Inequality Database on Education" or WIDE.
With the global youth unemployment rate falling at around 12 percent and ranging to over 50 percent in some countries, specific data on the discrepancies in education is vital for effective program design, and WIDE provides a great new tool with that end goal in mind.
(Via Oxfam's Ricardo Fuentes.)
