Learning Narrative Youth Self-Employment Capabilities
Self-employment capabilities are defined as the knowledge, confidence and development of strategies to identify and sustain a micro- or small enterprise in safe and decent ways. This was tested through youth’s knowledge and understanding of business planning, financial management and market analysis concepts, as well as youth’s entrepreneurial mindset – a set of non-cognitive and contextually-based skills and behaviors that lay the foundation for youth enterprise development. Self-employment capabilities were also tested by how youth apply and demonstrate these skills, determined by what youth actively do to generate, manage, and sustain income for themselves and their family over time during and after the YiA program.
This narrative used a mixed-methods approach to review data, leveraging a series of qualitative and quantitative studies on youth’s perspectives and self-assessments of their self-employment skills and work status. Studies were conducted at different stages of youth’s involvement of the program – before YiA, directly after YiA and at least nine months after youth’s involvement with YiA.