underutilization rate of 61.1 percent for men and 72.8 percent for women (Elder & Kone, 2014).<sup>4</sup> Second, much of the employment in which youth engage yields very limited earnings. This paper concentrates primarily on the first theme, by exploring the barriers to productive employment for young women, exploring individual and household constraints to labor market entry and earnings in informal and wage work. The World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) white papers on entrepreneurship and agriculture expand on the barriers to productivity and earnings for those women (the majority) who end up in self-employment and agriculture, respectively.

The importance of promoting youth employment has prompted massive investment in Sub-Saharan Africa in the past decade, but few programs have emphasized the importance of targeting young women. The GIL has led research to build the global evidence base on supporting young women’s employment for several years. This paper synthesizes the emerging lessons from this growing evidence base (from GIL and others) and places them in a larger framework of what we know about the constraints to young women’s employment and what we know about how to alleviate those constraints. The objective is to develop a gender-informed policy and research agenda on youth employment that can guide GIL’s work as well as policy makers, practitioners, development partners, and researchers who seek to advance young women’s empowerment and employment in the context of youth employment programming and policy making.

# **_Youth and Women’s Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa_**

In Sub-Saharan Africa, employment in general and women’s employment in particular exhibit somewhat different patterns relative to other regions of the world. In this region, youth leave school earlier than in other regions and join the workforce at an earlier age. The ILO’s SWTS found that among those aged 15 to 17, 16.7 percent were out of school and working, and another 10.0 percent were not in education, employment, or training (ILO, 2015). In 2014, among those aged 15 to 24, 51.0 percent of women and 55.8 percent of men were part of the labor force (World Bank, 2015).

While employment rates are among the highest in the world, at 46.8 percent in the region for those aged 15 to 24, they are not necessarily indicative of productivity. Because many countries in the region have yet to undergo a structural transformation into an industrialized economy, employment is concentrated in smallholder agriculture and informal self-employment, including household enterprises. Sub-Saharan Africa’s employment has the largest concentration in agriculture in the world at 62.0 percent, with South Asia following at 46.3 percent. Only 8.4 percent and 29.6 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s employment are in industry and services respectively (ILO, 2013a). Hence, in this paper, we define employment broadly to include any type of income-generating activity, including informal work.

Wage employment, particularly in the formal sector, is the exception rather than the rule: while wage and salaried work accounts for close to half of global employment, it only accounts for 21.4 percent of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa (ILO, 2013b). In a survey of youth in eight countries in the region, 71.7 percent of working youth were engaged in self-employment. Moreover, women were more likely

> 4 The measure of underutilization includes those in irregular employment and those who are neither employed nor in school.

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