(where so many youth live), increased connectivity between rural and urban areas, and measures to increase private investment in urban areas in labor‐intensive production of goods and services so that more wage jobs will be on offer—and there will be more opportunities in the HE sector.

In lower‐income countries where the labor force is young and growing rapidly—and especially in Africa—the employment transformation will continue to lag the transformation in the structure of production, and this lag will also frustrate youth. In countries where effective economic transformation policies are stymied by governance and political economy challenges, youth will be even more restive.

Different interventions might help, but they need to be tested. For example, the results from the two programs in Uganda (ELA and EDUCATE!) suggest that there may be cheap interventions that could be introduced into secondary schools or as after‐school programs to bolster character skills and provide more knowledge about labor market opportunities, thus speeding youth’s transition into the household production sector. Overall, it is unclear where the deficits in character skills are greatest (what types and for whom), how they interact with other youth development challenges, and what role these skills play in improved employment outcomes in a situation where most youth will not have a clear livelihood pathway such as a lifetime wage job in a firm or subsector. In other words, we need to understand more about the actual needs of youth.

Outcomes tend to be measured very soon after development projects are completed. This timing may yield misleading results—either an underestimation or an overestimation of benefits. Longer‐term evaluations now coming in, especially from Latin America, are helpful. They have mostly indicated that control groups tend to catch up, although some programs were found to deliver additional benefits to treatment groups aside from the initial advantages. Those benefits include spillovers to family members and the accumulation of increased wealth by treatment groups in the period that they are ahead of their control‐group peers. In the case of HE owners, longer‐term evaluations have highlighted the time it takes for program participants to act on the skills built in business training, and the importance of additional constraints beyond skills. At the same time, it is important for future impact evaluations to consider the issue of displacement, especially in evaluating programs to train workers for wage jobs. _It is no longer sufficient to just check and see if the program managed to insert participants into a job_ .

Finally, other data are needed to help capture and understand how employment processes operate. For example, data on what youth are actually doing and how they manage their transition are still not widely available. One problem is that national survey data provide a poor picture of what the labor force is actually doing. A large share of the labor force in low‐income countries undertakes a number of activities over the year. Surveys are limited because they tend to focus on (1) activities over the last seven days (in part because this is the recall period used to measure unemployment according to international standards) or (2) the main activity only, not a second job (regardless of recall period). Yet an important characteristic of youth, especially low‐income youth, is that they move between activities during their search (Filmer and Fox, 2014; Fox and Pimhidzai, 2013). More survey research may be needed on how to collect such data efficiently in low‐income settings; recall periods as long as one year are certainly problematic but perhaps the quality of response could be improved with a different type of questionnaire. New research on income sources over the year using diaries is one example of this type of innovation.

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