Can Cash Grants Help Create Jobs and Stability?
Policymakers throughout the world struggle to boost employment. Creating jobs or giving people the right training to get jobs is not only good economics, but especially in developing countries, it may be a way to reduce social instability and with...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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Washington, DC
2014
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2011/12/16653977/can-cash-grants-help-create-jobs-stability http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17111 |
| Summary: | Policymakers throughout the world
struggle to boost employment. Creating jobs or giving people
the right training to get jobs is not only good economics,
but especially in developing countries, it may be a way to
reduce social instability and with it the threat of crime
and unrest. In the push to figure out what works,
development organizations and governments are looking beyond
the more traditional voucher and microfinance tools to
decentralized programs that give cash grants and leave it to
recipients to decide how to use the money. At the World
Bank, committed to ending poverty and we are working to help
meet the United Nations millennium development goals,
including eradicating extreme poverty by raising incomes and
making sure everyone has decent employment. To help
policymakers judge the effectiveness of different approaches
to building employment opportunities, the World Bank
sponsored an evaluation of a Government of Uganda program
that gave young men and women cash grants to start new
businesses or get training. Based on mid-term results two
years after the intervention, the Ugandan program made
significant impacts: Beneficiaries reported large increases
in skilled employment and incomes, and modest gains in
social cohesion and stability. Researchers and Innovations
for Poverty Action (IPA) partnered with the Ugandan
government to evaluate the effectiveness of the youth
opportunities program, introduced in 2006 to raise incomes
and employment among young adults aged 16 to 35 in the
country's northern region by offering them cash grants
for training and busi-ness materials. To qualify, young
adults had to organize in groups of 10 to 30 people and
submit a proposal for a grant to cover training programs and
what tools and materials they needed to run a business.
Helping young adults find jobs is a key goal of policymakers
in emerging economies, where high rates of unemployment are
a potential social and economic problem. Many countries are
working with vouchers, training programs and microfinance to
raise employment opportunities. Uganda, which over the past
decade emerged from a brutal armed conflict in the north,
has been working to alleviate poverty and raise jobs options
in this hard-hit region. In a new approach, the government
funded a program that gave unsupervised cash grants to young
adults who drew up business plans explaining what they would
do with the money. |
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