Youth Employment Working Group: Holistic Approaches, Lucia Diaz-Martin J-PAL

This Youth Employment Working Group Coffee and Bagel session will focus on holistic approaches and feature speaker Lucia Diaz-Martin from J-PAL.

Lucia Diaz-Martin:

J-PAL has a new research initiative called the Gender and Economic Agency Initiative (GEA). We are interested in addressing evidence gaps related to women’s work, with a focus on East Africa and South Asia. An important theme when it comes to enhancing young women’s employment opportunities is addressing the multiple constraints that young women face through holistic and multi-sectoral programming. In particular, women’s scope for reproductive choice (before having children), access to child care (after having children), and limited decision-making in the household are all gender-specific constraints that women face to reaching their employment goals, and are constraints that can be at least partially addressed through intentional gender-responsive labor market programming. I will present some rigorous evidence on this topic, feature promising holistic interventions to test further, and open questions to date.