household and productive work. Just over one-third of young (15-24-year-old) Liberians are in the labor force. Young women are more likely than young men to be out of the labor force because they are engaged in household duties (30.4 percent v. 18.9 percent), and young men are more likely to be out of the labor force because they are still in school (75.8 percent v. 63.0 percent) (LISGIS 2010).

Given their initial disadvantage relative to their male peers, and the sources of this disadvantage in social norms, market failures, and poorly functioning institutions, adolescent girls may require targeted policy and program efforts to achieve better outcomes. However, as in many other post-conflict situations, emergency skills training and public works programs in Liberia have targeted male youth excombatants, likely reinforcing rather than reducing adolescent girls’ disadvantage. The few skills training programs for adolescent girls, run largely by NGOs, have focused on traditional female skills (such as sewing, soap production, tie-dyeing) for which the market is already well-supplied.

Programs designed to enhance employment among young people can focus on the supply side of the labor market, including skills training programs for both wage employment and entrepreneurship training; or programs to augment demand, such as wage subsidies, public works, and community service programs; or programs to help the labor market clear, such as job search assistance and placement services. In addition, it may be that the constraints facing young people are not in the labor market itself, but in other markets, such as for credit. The vast majority of jobs programs have focused on the supply side: training programs make up about 79 percent of over 600 cases included in the World Bank’s Youth Employment Inventory database.<sup>3</sup> Although rigorous and general evidence of success is limited, it seems that successful skills training programs share a few key features: they are responsive to local market conditions, they provide more than just technical skills in a specific area (including, for example, “life skills”), and they include ancillary services that alleviate other constraints preventing successful labor market integration (e.g., access to credit). Among the most celebrated are the _Jovenes_ programs that provide demand-driven technical training, plus social skills that help in the labor market, plus internships. These programs have had positive impacts on wages and employment, especially for young women and those from more disadvantaged backgrounds (Ibarrarán and Rosas 2009).

This paper evaluates the first round of the EPAG (“Economic Empowerment of Adolescent Girls and Young Women”) skills training program implemented by the Government of Liberia from 2010 to 2011. EPAG was designed to alleviate the barriers to entering the labor market faced by young women, while avoiding the shortfalls of previous skills training programs offered in Liberia. The program combined six months of classroom-based technical and life skills training, with a focus on skills with high market demand, followed by six months of follow-up support to enter wage employment or start a business. Roughly 1200 young women aged 16-27 participated in the first round of EPAG.

> 3 See http://www.youth-employment-inventory.org/.  Also, although focused on a narrower time frame and using a different selection criterion, the joint ILO/World Bank Inventory of Policy responses to the Financial Crisis - <u>(http://www.ilo.org/crisis inventory) finds that “about 78 percent of reported policy measures focused on the</u> supply side”, essentially through training (ILO/WB 2012).

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