Wired4Work! – Technology for YEE Solutions in the Philippines incl COVID-19 prevention and response SUMMARY 
Over 33 million youth in Asia are struggling to find jobs. Gender inequality is slowing down the transition towards inclusive growth due to women’s limited access to education/employment. In January 2018 Plan International Philippines started Wired4Work! (W4W). A 3 year innovative Youth Economic Empowerment (YEE) programme that leverages scalable digital solutions to increase the capacity of practitioners in reaching youth in high quality employment. W4W is focused on vulnerable youth (16-29 years old), especially women, in NCR, Cebu, Tacloban and Mindoro who acquire vocational, soft and work readiness skills to successfully enter the labour market. By the end of 2020, 3,600 disadvantaged youth will be trained and 2,700 will have access to decent employment. ILO estimates that 392 million young people have any form of education, employment and training (NEET). Half of those young people live in South Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. These numbers continue to rise, underlining the urgent need to address global youth unemployment.

In the Philippines youth unemployment is 12.8% for young men and 14.5% for young women. Young people face a persistent challenge of jobs mismatch, where their education or training does not match market demand. Despite making up half of the total population, prevailing gender norms affect the participation of young women in the labour market, with young women representing only 39% of the total youth workforce in 2016. Wired4Work will focus on the following components: 

1. Private sector engagement: consisted on the creation of shared value implementation approaches and partnerships with private & public sector actors, training institutions and community-based organizations to increase the job opportunities of youth and develop effective market-driven training curricula to fill in the gap between the offer of trainings and the demand needed in the labour market.  

2. Youth skills development and empowerment: Digitally enhanced YEE training solutions are developed, leveraged and scaled to enable vulnerable youth, especially young women, to pursue employment and economic empowerment opportunities. Online modules of the training curricula are developed in the demonstration countries and scaled up to other countries through the YES!ACADEMY (e-learning platform). 

3. Enabling environment for youth employment, by strengthening alliances and networks: Through regional and local influence, advocacy and support, this component will facilitate and lead alliances that favour greater inclusion in the labour market for vulnerable youth, especially young women. This component is focused on engaging multiple actors/alliances to create an enabling environment for effective youth employment programming. Plan will also offer youth themselves a platform to participate and influence both public and private policy development.

4. Program quality and innovation to leverage impact
The improvement and further development of the YES!DIGITAL Ecosystem of Plan International will bring high quality youth employment initiatives to scale, building capacity of Plan International offices to integrate the Digital Ecosystem assets into their YEE programs, and expanding them with additional services to evolve programs into a full circle digitally enhanced approach. New innovations are developed, especially the YES!CNEXT (match platform for job seekers and companies jobs) using a Human Centered Design approach. Wired4Work is built on assets developed by Plan international since 2011 in alliance with one of its  partners from the private sector that has resulted in the training of more than 15,000 youth and the transition of more than 12,000 youth into decent work across Asia and Latin America. These assets include the market scan methodology, YES!ME (direct beneficiary monitoring) system and assessment of high level requirements for e-learning management systems. In multiple strategic partnerships with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank’s Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) Coalition, Plan International is working together with other parties of the private and public sector to catalyse new public-private sector partnerships and support new innovative programs for youth economic empowerment. 

Plan international Philippines works closely together with the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority  (TESDA), the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE) in previous youth empowerment projects in the areas of implementation of Wired4Work!. These organisations are mandated by law to facilitate skills training and employment facilitation in the country and play a critical role in ensuring that young people are equipped with the proper skills and are linked through the proper channels. Plan International Philippines will target 3,600 vulnerable and marginalised youth aged 18-29 from urban and rural areas in Cebu, Mindoro, Tacloban and National Capital Region (NCR) with a participation of 50% young women. In particular, Plan will focus on youth neither educated, employed (NEETs), senior high school students and youth enrolled in secondary and TVET (technical and vocational education training) schools. The following work plan is considered to lead to the targets and outputs of the project:
Component 1: private sector engagement
o	Conduct a market scan in all implementation areas to determine the labor market trends and opportunities for the target group of vulnerable youth.
o	Establish agreements with private sector partners to ensure commitment towards hiring youth trained by Plan International, develop traineeship and upskilling opportunities, and create robust mechanisms to link vulnerable youth, particularly young women to opportunities for employment.
o	Engage with stakeholders to jointly develop market-based and digitally enhanced curricula and training programs.
o	Create shared value business with companies. 

Component 2: Youth skills development and empowerment
o	Development and scaling up digitally enhanced training modules 
o	Development of a strategy for youth recruitment 
o	Equipping youth with technical and vocational skills
o	Placement of youth in jobs
o	Create mechanism for community support for youth

Component 3: 
o	Engage multiple actors/alliances to create an enabling environment for effective youth employment programming. 
o	Offer youth a platform to participate and influence both public and private policy development.
o	Utilize big data to support and showcase project impact in a reliable, robust and credible way, and to scale up high quality project components and move toward evidence based influence advocacy. 

Component 4: 
o	Enhance Alumni engagement by creating a digital platform (or space) which enables students to scale up the network and Capacity building for alumni associations. Plan has secured and allotted funding for at least 10 countries for 2018-2020 to roll out different pieces of the Ecosystem to support programming. But as a key component for the implementation of Plan’s Global Strategic Framework on Youth Employment, Entrepreneurship and Empowerment (YEE), Plan envisions the global adoption of (pieces of the) Ecosystem, with each country office using at least one component for their programs. This will require a comprehensive analysis of the capacities and resources needed to rollout, manage and sustain the effort. Hence, Plan will be undertaking the development of a growth and governance strategy, which would complement the Global Strategic Framework and include the development of a viable business model (e.g. commercial; social enterprise model, such as the open source cooperative; data as an asset; or others) that will guide the organization in securing the resources that will sustain the YES!DIGITAL Ecosystem’s operation and growth.