are further explored by Guerra, Modecki, and Cunningham (2014), who bridge the literature in psychology, economics, and education, to analyze and categorize socio-emotional skills important to employers. The authors found that it is important to begin development of resilience, control, teamwork, and initiative in early childhood (ages 0 to 5), and develop problem solving skills, achievement motivation, confidence, and ethics in middle childhood (ages 6 to 11). However, reinforcing these skills with intense practice during adolescence and emerging adulthood is essential to skill development for the workforce.

While some of these socio-emotional skills can be taught in the classroom, they are also learned and practiced in everyday life, and influenced by social norms, culture, exposure to public spaces and the workforce, networks, and factors. These factors may limit young women’s development of these skills more than young men’s. Gender stereotypes and differential investments are often actualized in the household, which underscores the importance of involving families in foundational skill development. Because young people who do not gain these foundational skills through formal education or at home are disadvantaged when entering the labor market, there is growing attention to these skills in youth employment programs. More work is needed to disentangle the relative importance of specific types of socio-emotional skills needed for young men and women.

In addition to these foundational skills, labor market success requires two other types of skills not normally delivered in primary and secondary education. These include technical and vocational skills that are in demand in the labor market as well as business and entrepreneurship skills, which are especially important in Sub-Saharan Africa where many youth are forced into self-employment due to the scarcity of wage jobs (see Figure 2). However, the market for business and vocational training is weak in most African countries. Many youth cannot afford and are unable to borrow to invest in these skills. Even when training is affordable, youth struggle to identify high quality training in market-relevant skills in a crowded and unregulated market. Youth are more constrained than adults by the weak market for skills acquisition because they have not had the chance to acquire skills, nor learn which specific skills to acquire, through work experience.

The failure of education systems to adequately prepare youth, and the resulting difficulty in accessing employment, point to the need for government intervention to improve the public provision of education and training, develop standards and certifications for all training providers (public and private), actively promote both men’s and women’s acquisition of skills, and promote soft-skill development in and out of school. Further, while evidence indicates that technical, business, and soft skills are important to success, relatively less is known about the optimal methods and order of skill acquisition that are most effective in creating a productive workforce.

# **2.2 Capital**

Facilitating access to capital is an important way to address youth unemployment, either directly by enabling youth to start businesses to employ themselves or indirectly by facilitating existing firms to expand and hire youth. Yet access to finance remains an important barrier to business creation and growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to a World Bank survey of new entrepreneurs in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, 9