Work4Youth: Improving youth employment prospects through learn and earn programmes Of the world's estimated 207 million unemployed people in 2009, nearly 40 per cent - or about 81 million - were between 15 and 24 years of age. In many countries, this grim unemployment picture is darkened by the large number of youth engaged in poor quality and low paid jobs with intermittent and insecure work arrangements, including in the informal economy. Many youth are poor or underemployed: some 152 million young people, or 28 per cent of all young workers in the world, work but live in households that earn less than the per capita equivalent of US$1.25 a day. Despite declining fertility and the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains the world's fastest growing with an annual average of 2.4 per cent. The youth laboru force is expected to grow by an average of 2.2 million young people every year between 2010 and 2015. A growing labour force can be an asset for society if the economy generates enough jobs, but threatens stability and prosperity when there is high competition to find jobs among the many young people entering the labour market. This situation has been observed over long periods in SSA. Open unemployment in this region is but the tip of the iceberg. Most young people in the region cannot afford not to work and get trapped into a spiral of low-paid and poor quality jobs in the informal economy. The proposed Programme aims to contribute to the promotion of decent work for young women and men - both at the global level and in five selected countries of SSA - and to the eradication of proverty and extreme hunger (MDG1). The underpinning strategy is based on a two-pronged approach that addresses the urgent need to improve both quality and quantity of jobs for youth in SSA while working toward the broader global goal of promoting decent and productive employment for all young men and women. More specifically, the Programme aims to: 1) improve the knowledge base on the transition of young people to work at national, regional and global levels through the development of global products and the implementation of school-to-work transition survey in 28 countries across the globe, and 2) implement national programmes in five countries of SSA through a package of youth employment measures that will allow young people to learn while they earn. For the latter, the proposed portfolio will offer a range of youth livelihood services with a view to improving access to human, financial and social capital. This strategy will be implemented through a series of institution-building and direct assistance initiatives. The main target groups of the proposed initiative are youth employment policy-makers and institutions of 28 countries as well as young working poor, unemployed and in-school youth of five countries of SSA. This initiative will uphold gender equality as cross-cutting theme, including through affirmative action to improve the status of young women in the labour market. The learn-and-earn Programme is a 60-month, US$50.6 million initiative, submitted by the ILO for funding to The MasterCard Foundation. The outcomes that are expected to be achieved by the end of the Programme (2015) are: i)improved youth employment policies and programmes through better knowledge of the characteristics and determinants of the youth employment challenge at national, regional and global levels, as well as of effective youth employment practice, and ii) increased access to more better quality jobs for more than 100,000 young unemployed and working poor in five Least Developed Countries of SSA through integrated learn-and-earn programmes. This proposal is in line with the youth learning programme strategy of the MasterCard Foundation (MCF) that aims to empower youth to participate in the economy and lead change in their communities. It also reflects the three main objectives of the same strategy, i.e. enable continued learning, facilitate connections to market and suppor