Wired4Work! - Using technology for Youth Economic Empowerment Solutions (YES) Program 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 and employment. In January 2018 Plan international started Wired4Work! (W4W). A 3 year innovative Youth Economic Empowerment (YEE) programme that leverages scalable digital solutions to increase the capacity of YEE practitioners in reaching youth in high quality employment. W4W is focused on vulnerable youth (16-29 years old), especially women, in Indonesia and the Philippines, who acquire vocational, soft and work readiness skills to successfully enter the labour market. By the end of 2020, 14,000 disadvantaged youth will be trained and 5,700 will have access to decent employment. Over the next decade, more than one billion youth across Asia will enter the labour force, with the potential to be the region’s greatest resource for sustainable economic and social growth. But they face an uncertain landscape, with over 33 million youth struggling to find jobs, and 48% of employers reporting difficulties to fill vacancies due to the lack of medium/high skilled applicants. This skills gap reflects pronounced weaknesses in the policies and systems designed to boost skills development, where youth across the region simply do not receive the right skills to facilitate their transition into decent work. Decision-makers and institutions underestimate the importance of aligning skills training with labour market needs, neglecting to engage private sector and local communities in Technical & Vocational Education & Training (TVET) planning and design. Also, while integration of ICT in training curricula and processes is key to raising worker productivity and preparing for jobs of the future, ICT is still under-utilized.
Gender inequalities in the region’s labour market are slowing the transition towards inclusive growth. Estimates suggest that the region loses up to $77 billion per year due to gender gaps in education and women’s limited access to employment opportunities, education and financial services. While women’s performance in various Asian labour markets may vary, women overall are under-represented in formal employment and over-represented in unemployment rates, low-skilled, low-paid and unpaid work. 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 – a match platform for job seekers and companies jobs, using 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. W4W! targets 13,866 vulnerable youth, especially women, in rural and urban areas in Indonesia and the Philippines. 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. 
o	Develop and adopt a set of gender-transformative criteria to guide youth employment programming in the region.
o	Enhance Monitoring and Evaluation and improve project design through integrated data collection and analysis 
o	Strengthen the capacity of Plan offices and partners in executing digitally-enhanced youth employment programming. Internally, 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.