 this afternoon or we're thrilled that you have joined us now. My name is Nicole Golden. I'm a senior associate here with the Project on Prosperity and Development and I'm really thrilled to be here to lead our afternoon discussion with three very esteemed colleagues that I will introduce briefly in a moment. The persistence of food security, rural poverty, as well as a sense of urgency that's developing around demographics and the global youth unemployment crisis, I think is elevating the conversation around youth employment, youth workforce and in particular on agriculture to new levels. Roughly half the world's population, as many of you may know, is under the age of 25, roughly 85% of those young people live in the developing world where agriculture is still a large share of GDP and of employment as much as 70% in many places. At the same time around the world, young people are three or four times more likely to be unemployed than the general population and undermining economic growth, destabilizing families and communities and really dampening future prospects not only of young people but their countries and really the world at large. IFC, the International Finance Corporation, is estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia a million jobs a month, a million a month are required to be created, new jobs created just to keep up with population and new entrants into the labor force. So really again we're seeing a huge need to engage young people and to get them into the workforce in a sustainable and productive way. And while we know that there are many kind of shared constraints and challenges to that, to engaging young people in the workforce which we're going to talk about, there are some distinct factors associated with agriculture, sort of a unique set of challenges that we will hopefully explore and unpack a little more today. And we're really still I think learning about those dynamics and searching for what works, but we know that the jobs and sort of labor market crisis has no single cause, no single solution. Whether it's the shortage or the mismatch of skills or entrepreneurialism or other constraints such as in particular to agriculture such as stigma, low productivity, lack of access to land and or value chains, all these things are limiting youth opportunity and rural populations opportunities. One thing that experience and emerging evidence does make abundantly clear is that collaboration is required, that it's an all hands on deck approach. Public and private sectors may have differing bottom lines, but both have much to gain or lose when it comes to harnessing youth's potential. So there's lots of space for innovation to create shared value and to find ways that serve both the interests of rural youth as well as the interests of business. So with that I'm very pleased to introduce our various team panel to help us explore these issues and these dynamics a little bit further. We have Bill Guyton from the World Coco Foundation. You have their bios. He's really been sort of leading and not only developing the World Coco Foundation, but for many years looking at sustainable agriculture and how to bridge industry and government and bring those together. My friend and colleague Bill Reese, president and CEO of the International Youth Foundation, who to many in the room needs no introduction, but has been, as my friend and colleague Dan Rindy says, doing public-private partnerships before they were cool. And of course we have Threlta Harsheri, Youssef, a youth and youth development workforce specialist with DAI among a number of other hats that we'll hear about a technologist as well. So with that we're going to have them all just share a few words of their own perspectives and we'll go from there into some questions. And thanks again for joining us. Great, Nicole. And thank you for the introduction. And it's really a pleasure for me to be here on the panel with Bill and with Shari as well. As Nicole mentioned, I'm with the World Coco Foundation, another organization that was formed back in 2000 by a handful of chocolate companies at the time. Today we are about 110 companies that represent large branded companies, processors, traders from different geographies, including North America and Europe primarily, but also increasingly a lot of companies from cocoa producing regions of the world such as West Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Our model of programs or implementation on the ground has been through partnerships and over the years we've developed strong partnerships with USAID, with U.S. Department of Agriculture here in the United States as well as with the Gates Foundation and others. A lot of our focus has been on, in the past has been on looking at some of the outreach programs that we can do at the farm level through farmer field schools. And in particular one of our first programs was the Sustainable Tree Crops program with USAID, which reached many farmers in West Africa. We used the farmer field school methodology during that training and it was interesting for me to go and visit some of the farmers at that time because looking at the average age, most of them were probably in their 40s or 50s. It was rare to get younger people involved in those programs. So we realized that we needed to do a better job of reaching out to the next generation of cocoa farmers. So just to give a little bit of context about cocoa, about 2 million cocoa farmers in West Africa, 70% of the supply, government-controlled boards in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, so you can't ignore the public sector when you're looking at outreach to cocoa farmers. Family farms usually have five hectares or less, so very small family farms scattered around rural areas. A lot of the farmers are tenant farmers. Lack of access to schools, particularly in Cote d'Ivoire, that's a problem where in the cocoa sector there's estimated 3,000 schools that are needed in order to reach the growing number of young people. And at the same time, there's severe problems with the cocoa itself. About a third of the crop is lost to diseases and pests each year. So we've given that context and all of the problems that are out there, we realized that within the cocoa industry that we needed to step up and do more. So in 2012, 2013, we made a fairly radical change in the cocoa sector within the World Cocoa Foundation. We reformulated our board to include CEO or Vice Presidents of the major companies as well as some of the smaller company representatives. We formed a technical working committee under the board that would really look deeper into how we better implement programs on the ground and better reach different ages of cocoa farmers. And that was the birth of cocoa action, which is our platform that we call it today, which includes 11 of the largest chocolate and cocoa companies in the world. These 11 companies signed a letter of intent or statement of intent with our organization to reach over 300,000 farmers in West Africa in Ghana and Kote War with the intent of really taking a step change in improving the productivity in the livelihoods. They agreed to a combined package of productivity, such as improved access to fertilizer and planting material and farmer training as well as community development, such as improved access to education, gender, as well as child labor prevention. So if we're looking at the youth inclusion and young farmers, it really fits into both pillars of what we're looking at in cocoa action. There's a productivity side to it, and there's also within the community development pillar under the educational way that we need to more effectively reach these young farmers. So in May of last year, we signed an MOU with the governments of both Ghana and Kote War with the heads of states of those countries. We brought our board out to West Africa where they visited each other's cocoa farms or cocoa programs and got a much better idea of what their competitors were doing on the ground and how we could better capitalize on what everyone was doing on the ground to really make a much bigger impact on the ground. So the other interesting thing about cocoa action is that we agreed on a common results framework on how we measure progress or success, and that has never been done in the past. Individual companies have had their own ways of measuring progress or implementing programs. We want to allow that creativity to continue forward and to foster innovation, but also to look at how we better measure progress across different companies and programs. So we're excited about this, and it's going to be an interesting journey over the next few years to see how it evolves. And we also want to see how we can better reach out to the next generation of cocoa farmers, realizing that there are so many young people out there that possibly can move into the cocoa sector, whether that be into farming or other services in the supply chain. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much, Bill. I definitely have a couple of follow-up questions, but for now I want to keep opening up the conversation and unpacking some of the issues to address. So I'm going to turn it over to Bill to speak from kind of IYF experience and workforce across many sectors. Thanks, Nicole, and thank you to CSIS and RMC and host today, Dan. Rondi, we're happy at IYF to have created a partnership with CSIS to make youth, not a special little interest group that people talk about in research over here on the side, but see that it cuts across the whole notion of peace, prosperity, security issues. I think tank like this would be dealing with workforce development. And I'm glad to follow Bill, who has the real rural agriculture experience because most of our work is in urban areas. But workforce development and really the billion new jobs that need to be created over the next 10 years to absorb this youth cohort in well absorb it into the 21st century economy is both urban and rural. And we can talk about men and women being from Mars and Venus, but rural and urban aren't on different planets. And they have they do interact in good ways and bad ways as people move from one to the other. And unfortunately, they're really only moving from one to the other and not back and forth. But we need success for young people, economic growth and inclusion in both sectors, rural and urban. And it's not just to keep people back on the farm, so to speak, or out of the cities. Urbanization really is a trend that will not go away. But both cultures or environments, if you will, of urban and rural, they both must prosper. And what we've heard this morning is a real focus on the rural areas. And how do you bring that young population or that's the way we would look at it here in this panel, how do you bring them in so that they see the potential that our speakers earlier have been saying, Well, there's great potential out there in these small holder fire and value chains and all that. Well, try telling that to an 18 or 22 year old who only sees an opportunity maybe in a capital city. So that youth bulge is huge. It's been talked about now for five or 10 years. It will go away over the next 40 or 50 or 60 years. But that's that's a long time. And it will be a factor, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, North Africa. Frankly, it's the youth bulge is or youth employability is a challenge in every country in the world. And we published a couple of years ago, a white paper called opportunity for action preparing youth for 21st century livelihoods and it covers rich and poor countries. Italy with a shrinking population still doesn't have all its young people well employed. So we this is a global phenomenon that we all can get our hands around. And the return on investment when we do it right. And there's no way that we societies can do it right without all the sectors working together. The return on investment out of a good youth program. You get a healthy, civically engaged and employed adult. That's the outcome we're looking for. And the return on investment for that is 50 years that 20 year old will live at least another 50 years, hopefully working most of those 50 years and being a taxpayer and without becoming a taxpayer, the societies that she and here living in won't be sustainable. Nicole Golden helped us Hilton Worldwide IYF and CSIS created global youth well being index. And we published it a year ago and it really is an analytical tool and investors guide that you all could use. It's not not proprietary. It talks about six domains of well being education, healthiness, civic engagement, a sense of hope and security, the psychological peace. What does a young person see in his or her future and in their life in a given country, their IT connectivity and their employability. And I like to say that if we get them through all those domains in a nice progression, because some people say youth development is only really a transition from childhood to adulthood. When we get them through to become an 18, 20, 22 year old and they can't find a job. I think we've failed. We've all failed. Society's failed. So shared value is not really just a new name for on your old wine bottle. Although corporate partnerships and public private partnerships and things like that have gone on for years and years, but particularly at USAID with the global development lines when they decided to try to mainstream that. And then you start seeing it playing across other development agencies and private foundations. That too has helped I think the corporate world and the corporate world has helped the public and philanthropic sectors really understand what shared value can mean. And what we are experiences at IYF with Caterpillar Cummins, Hilton Worldwide, McDonald's, Walmart. And I will say two companies too. We did $70 million of CSR investment with Nokia and Lucent. Guess how much they're giving today? Zero. A company cannot have a shared value or philanthropic or CSR program if it's not making money. So just remember that. Employability to us is really job readiness. Some people talk about the technical skills that the market needs, the skills mismatch. A lot of more people today are talking about the life skills, the employability skills. Others will say companies higher for the technical skills they think they need and then fire for the lack of life skills or problem-solving or employability skills that that young person doesn't bring to the job. There's an awful lot of talk about intrapreneurship and there should be. But I maintain that we want all young people to be intrapreneurs or be intrapreneurial in a mindset because frankly if you're not intrapreneurial you probably won't find to be able to go out and even market yourself to get a good job even though you're working for someone else. Not everyone who takes a hundred dollar loan from microcredit in my book is an intrapreneur. That's survival economics. But don't we want all young people to be intrapreneurial. But intrapreneurship too as a piece of the economic pie is terribly important because there won't be enough jobs. Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. So to put in our mind that the goal is to get a job in the formal economy that pays taxes that receive social benefits as a social safety net great but there won't be enough jobs. So how do we get young people in a mindset to create their own livelihood maybe an informal self-employment that could maybe someday lead to a bigger piece of work. We've worked over the last few years in Antioquia for example in Colombia where 12 years ago the fellow who led the program down there from the private sector was the mayor. Well now he's the governor of Antioquia and he with Colombian and the types of international companies that we've been talking about today and with their Ministry of Labor not the Ministry of Education have been doing an all all sorts of things with us the Inter-American Development Bank USAID so you've got public, private, multilateral, and global and local companies and I just want to come back to Deidre White's point earlier the local private sector is as important or maybe more important to get involved in these public private partnerships and not just the big name global companies because frankly there's more money at that local level than there'll ever be from the big global companies and you get then the national buy-in if we talk about country ownership today and the local national businesses don't own any of their country's future we're not doing real well. We've done similar things in Egypt with USAID and Mastercard and working with different ministries too not just the Education Ministry if you're talking about hospitality you want to be working with the tourism ministry because they have a vested interest so when we talk about public private partnerships we need to look at the whole of government in that use of the word. I'll just close with one initiative that we and others have created in the last few years last few months really with the World Bank Accenture, RAND, the ILO, foreign aid agencies such as Norway, Germany and the UK foundation such as Rockefeller and Mastercard and multi-national such as Walmart, Hilton, Caterpillar, Microsoft and all and others and it's called Solutions for Youth Employment and the idea is to create a grand public private partnership if you will around learning, leveraging and linking of a proven practice scalable experiences to bring solutions to youth employment and I say solutions because there is no vaccine there's no one single technological with bang innovation it's going to solve youth employment in the United States or in the poorest countries in the world it's going to take a long term shared value partnership between public private non-profit for profit philanthropic to make it work in any society. Great thank you so much Bill. Sherry some thoughts. Thanks Nicole and thank you all for being here and thank you CSIS so I was asked to talk briefly about two things about technology and about skills development what are kind of the core skills to focus on and I thought the best way to do it would be really to give some just innovative case studies so I'm going to talk about a couple examples that I think really illustrate how technology can be more deeply embedded in the sector but I'll start just by saying that developing nations typically settle for technologies that have been developed somewhere else for other purposes and I think that there's a growing recognition that that's not sustainable that developing countries local communities really need to develop their own technologies with their own solutions and there's some very innovative work going on in that space MIT has a learning independence network project where they are developing these networks they're piloting it in Costa Rica and India right now where it's local universities local private sector local foundations that are really trying to leverage local solutions and local technology development and I think that that's really the best way to bring kind of the digital revolution into these developing communities. I heard the other day at CSIS round table that the average age globally I think of a farmer was 55 years old so if we really want to introduce technology into the ag sector it's going to be by youth and really engaging youth meeting youth where they are finding entry points that are appealing to youth they are digital natives they are early adopters and they will be the platform by which we're going to get technology deeply embedded into the sector. To date technology has really focused on mobile apps and text messaging really to help farmers you know link to suppliers understand weather forecasting etc but I think that we need to move beyond that now. I think that there's a lot of room for more innovative technology. One example that I have been working on and that I'm seeing kind of expanding is leveraging serious gaming and social media for youth engagement. So that would be game based learning digital games right now is an industry that's bigger than the music industry that's bigger than the film industry it's what youth are doing they are gaming all days so why not put that gaming to a more effective use. The beauty of well designed games are that the player assumes different roles they can fail in a safe environment they can understand kind of career progression what skills requirements are involved. It really designs and allows for a very deep interaction and safe environment for youth to really explore things they might not do and it's game based learning is just in time knowledge it's not just in case knowledge so you're really doing it hands on in a safe environment so that when you need it in the real world it's actually something you've done before. One example that's being worked on is something called Farmville I'm not sure if anyone's familiar but Facebook games are extremely popular millions of people are playing them so it's trying to look at gaming where you can use those games to change behavior virtually so it would be exposing the user to what various activities can or cannot be done on a farm what's the opportunities for engagement on a farm both kind of on farm and off farming activities but there's taking that gaming to a new level now and trying to engage that user in the real world as well so it's promoting a theory of change virtually as well as in the real world where you would be prompted at some point during the game to get offline go do something in the real world take a training course engage with an agriculture NGO you would get points and then come back in the game and progress more quickly so you're stimulating this virtual behavior change not just in the virtual world but in the real world as well there's another very interesting activity that starting also through MIT they're called fab labs their fabrication labs they're becoming extremely popular and highly effective again in developing local solutions to local problems they've done a great activity in India with milk contamination they were importing all kinds of equipment to deal with it it was unsustainable they couldn't maintain the equipment so they've developed some local solutions that have really kind of mitigated the problem at the local level they can fix the equipment they can modify the equipment on a local need basis so I really think that the top down approach in technology just doesn't work anymore and it's nice to see that there's a realization of this and a lot of effort being made to do that from the bottom up and really look at technology in a more innovative way there's another very interesting app called the lunda light poultry app it was developed by some poultry farmers in Uganda I'm sure some people in the room are familiar with it but for those that aren't it kind of takes that mobile app to a new level it's got a diagnosis function where you can visually diagnose what the problem may be with the poultry it's got a record keeping function where it helps you with your book keeping keeping reminds you of vaccination and feeding times it's got a store function where it can market you know through Google maps it can show you where drug stores are show you where you know sales points are so that's really hopefully where technology can can really take education and training to a new level I mean youth can be engaged as extension officers take these smartphones to the farm and really educate and train people on on site so I guess my conclusion in terms of technology is that there's a lot of innovation taking place and hopefully that will continue and that youth will definitely be the means by which we kind of get more technology in the sector in terms of skills what are the kind of skills that are in demand I spent the last year going from Egypt to Jordan to Pakistan Indonesia interviewing private sector employers kind of what in the terms of vocational and technical occupations what are your needs and I think almost across the board every employer said it is soft skills as Bill is just saying it is no longer technical skills attitude it's you know really just a focus on work ethic another big kind of consensus across the board was English the ability to read technical manuals is a huge obstacle I think English is the new operating system for lack of a better word in terms of global communication and training so I wish I could say there were kind of sector specific ones but I think across the board it's really attitude in English that came across as the big one great thank you all sure I'm going to stick with you for a minute I was fascinated to hear about the gaming and really the application of technology and one of the issues I mentioned in the opening we see with youth and agriculture in particular is this issue of stigma if you will that despite the vast opportunities for young people in agriculture and often the need that in many places young people simply aren't attracted to the sector aren't willing to really sort of make the investment for a long-term you know increasingly value added career in the sector do you think that sort of technology can help alleviate that I mean do you see the gaming and all these opportunities sort of making the industry you know sex here if you will I think it's just making its way into the ag sector the hospitality sector is one that has used gaming very successfully to overcome those kind of mindset changes and perception shifts so there are games I think it's the Hilton corporation but one of the larger kind of hotel corporations has used gaming where you build games and the player goes in as you know the bed maker and progresses along in the hotel to become an F and B manager and really see their career progress it kind of gives you your salary qualifications you really can role play and understand that there is potential in this career in a way that is almost impossible offline for lack of a better word so I definitely think and that's kind of the goal with these kind of farming and ad games is to really simulate the potential in the sector both on and off the farm I think DuPont and John Deere also have invested huge amounts of money into this gaming space and public schools at the lower level they call it the farm to fork games where little kids are learning where their dinner came from and getting excited about what it would mean to be able to make you know grow dinner so it's it's I think it's just moving into the ag sector but it's made huge progress in other areas where there's kind of taboos and culture of shames and kind of stigmas associated with the professions or careers. Yeah so interesting both you know Sherry you and Bill talked about the commonality that you're hearing from employers about soft skills life skills employability and I'm curious Bill Geithen you talked about sort of from a very industry perspective and your experience on farmer field schooling is that what you're hearing from you know within you know the ag industry and or are there more kind of technical skills and are you seeing an evolving of the kind of curricula for agricultural education and training. Now that's a great question Nicole and we're actually working on a program now with USAID it's a public private partnership called the African Cocoa Initiative and it covers four West African countries and the program is interesting because it's all about institutional capacity building in those countries and we're looking at different levels. There's one component that's looking at research it's looking at how to build the skills within the research institutes in Africa so that researchers young researchers have the ability to fingerprint Cocoa to know exactly what they've got in those research facilities and how to multiply. Through that through that component we've actually able been able to tie it in with USDA Borlaug program so we're bringing not only having those those researchers build capacity in country but bringing them over here to work with researchers in the United States at USDA and with land grant universities. Another component is really interesting too it's on what we're doing with crop life within that program to look at spray service providers and for that traditionally a lot of farmers have used sprayed their own farms a lot of times without protective gear and sometimes whether children are in the fields. So with this program or this component of the program of the African Cocoa Initiative we're actually professionalizing young people to be spray service providers to give them training on the proper clothing to wear and the proper application. So we're actually taking the sprays away from farmers and putting it giving it to professionals thus creating jobs in the rural sector. So we're employing people crop life in the rural sectors of Africa to do that. So that's that's an income or that's a job creation opportunity. And then the other one that's really interesting too is on the on the extension side. We're working to help build the capacity of local extension services in those countries by providing grants to local institutions on how to do that. And part of it gets back to Sherry and what you were saying about looking at new technologies and we have a for example a mobile phone technology project that we're working on through that with with our company members called Cocoa Link which is providing SMS messaging between farmers among farmers and with the extension service in Ghana and we're hoping to roll that out into other countries as well. So it's a little bit rudimentary compared with with your example Sherry but we're hoping someday that it will become more sophisticated and we'll get into mobile money and other applications which I think will be a magnet to young people. So Bill taking some of those Bill Reeves taking some of those thoughts forward you talked about entrepreneurialism in the work that you've been doing with with young entrepreneurs how important has the idea of sort of supply chains and value chains. And if you're thinking about sort of agricultural entrepreneurialism how important do you think that those opportunities are for kind of you know young people whether you know rural urban. Good. I mean we've heard a lot today and a lot has been written and talked about over the last couple of years about the agricultural value chains but there's a value chain in hospitality. Think how much is farmed out from a hotel to a laundry to a pastry maker to a you know the touristy arts and crafts that you would buy and they sell in the hotel these things aren't made by the hotel but they're supplied to the guy who grows tomatoes three miles away and brings them into the kitchen there a huge supply chain of an industry that employs 10 percent of the world's population travel tourism and resorts and that's not rich Europeans and Americans people think oh that must be ecotourism that's created all this stuff over no it's a billion people today that are in the middle class of the world that weren't there 30 and 40 years ago and they're Chinese and Indian and Brazilians and and so forth and they're traveling in their countries in their regions and around the world and that industry is huge so there is a supply chain or a value chain within hospitality there would be one within retail where does Walmart buy all its stuff Walmart may be the largest employer in Mexico and we're training a lot of their entry level people in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa but think of their supply chain of people who sell their stuff to be sold on on their floors those are tremendous opportunities in growth markets because retail hospitality service industries are not going to go away old fashioned manufacturing industries frankly are not where the jobs are today and there'll be fewer of them tomorrow but the and then if you're talking about entry level so your your your gaming the hotel is absolutely right you could come in making beds as an entry level you don't even probably need a full high school degree to start offer or busing tables in a hotel but if you do it well three years later you're head of hospitality for rooms you know floors five through 10 in a big hotel it's an upwardly mobile if people see it as a career and not just allows a first job but most of us in America think of first job is you know busing tables to when you get out of your liberal arts college and haven't yet found your first job but in much of the world that isn't what you do in the culture of shame whatever and however shame would be interpreted and sometimes it's a gender thing what I want my daughter working in a hotel isn't hotels where nasty things happen like sex and booze and dancing and all that so no I'm not going to let my daughter go work in that environment that may not be the case in Latin America but it would be the case in much of the Middle East how do you get around that but how do you get a hotel to to make that young woman and not and her parents feel that this is a good place for my daughter to be because it will treat her well and she'll have some upward mobility so there's a lot of work to be done here. You were a great segue as always Bill thinking ahead of me into a question Sherry I wanted to post to you about young women in particular whether it's in you know engaging young women in the science and technology aspects of gaming and technology and also just in the kind of skills and workforce work that you've been doing what have been some of the particular challenges that you've seen for young women and how you know are there any really good examples of that you've seen in terms of overcoming in terms of best practice. So good question. I was recently in Egypt and there was a there's an organization of foundation there called the Shura Foundation which is as Bill was saying kind of local CSR it's all local private sector companies that have invested in kind of Egypt's future farming farmers and really developing competitive crops so they focused on wheat as their competitive crop and all technical schools in Egypt technical vocational schools in the ag sector have a plot of land associated with them which are highly underutilized so they've partnered with the Ministry of Education to use those plots and they do these regular competitions where each person gets a certain piece of land and over a certain period of time he who has the most productive growth gets a 10,000 pound reward and then they go to the regional competition etc. Women had challenges kind of working on the farm per se so they designed a program that was specifically catered to where women could be kind of monitoring and do the data analysis for them and doing all the other parts of the non kind of working farm components of the competition. So I thought that was a successful model they also do they have a kind of one month internship program where they've worked with the Ministry of Education the private sector where students in their third year go for one year for this kind of on farm internship program. Again the women could not be sent for a month away so they designed it with a handful of private sector companies in local areas where they could go into kind of the office and do kind of non on farming activities. So I think it's really being able to accommodate in a geography geography on a geography by geography basis what are the cultural social constraints and working around them because I don't think it's a resistance of women to get into the workforce it's just being able to find something that is culturally and socially appropriate appropriate. It was interesting in Jordan as well in terms of gaming they have a gaming lab there that they're trying to develop. Again they're trying to get women from the rural areas to come in. It was a huge challenge so then they went out into the rural areas and they do these gaming kind of bootcamps and they do women only ones but one of the heads of the gaming lab was telling me women have a very particular skill set because right now in terms of the competitiveness of apps on phones has become so severe that the the graphics design is really the distinguishing element now and women have a particular ability to see the different colors in a in a different way than the man than males do. You ask a woman what color is your sweater it's pale green mint green it's for a male it's green. So these women have this competitive edge now in terms of being in graphics design and really making these apps far more competitive a lot of international companies are now outsourcing to these women. So I think it's really just understanding when and how and where they fit and designing kind of your intervention around that. Kind of young women in particular. Thank you Nicole. Well we have been engaged on a project in the past with our company members and and with USAID called ECHO's and I see Vicki Walker from Winrock International here and and also I know World Ed was was involved in that project. It was a great program looking at both strengthening basic education as well as vocational and outreach to women through family scholarships and it's it's such a great program because it's low cost. It's a way to to to work directly with women on helping them to start up new businesses and through that through that scholarship family scholarship the conditions were that the I think it was if I remember right Vicki you can correct me a third of the a third of the money went to keep their children in school and then the other two thirds to invest in their business over the next two year period. And then there was a kind of a peer pressure within the community to follow up afterwards to make sure that these women had invested in what they had said they would and to make sure that the children were still in school. So it was a really it's a really good project that that was started and it's actually still ongoing. I think there's a lot of companies that saw that that's it's an easy way to invest in a community and to really see some significant changes. I want to pick up on something Bill Reese that you said about thanks for giving a plug to our global youth well-being index. But one of the things again that we found is that the enabling environment and the conditions often matter in both sort of generating the supply side the workforce development as well as the demand side. So Bill Geithan just coming back to you as far as you know the sort of enabling conditions that you see you know being particularly important for the for getting into the industry for getting into agriculture and being successful where have you seen you know gaps from a kind of institutional or you know land rights or other kind of areas that may be affecting young people less explicitly than you know a skills piece. You thought on that yeah sort of Bill Geithan and then I think Nicole you mentioned of a word that sticks out in my mind a lot and that's land tenure and it's a huge problem in in West Africa as well as other areas where where cocoa has grown. And you know I remember just a few weeks ago I was meeting with the head of the cocoa marketing board in Ghana and they're looking at ways that they can provide land to young farmers and to give them the right skill set so that they can actually succeed but it's a slow go because land availability as we all know is a is a main constraint and in in particular in in Cotivar you have a lot of migrant and retentant farmers and and if if farmers don't have that are that are farming the land don't have control over the assets there it's really difficult to to move forward. So I think that's a critical factor. It's definitely something that you know we hear from young people as you know even beyond the stigma piece as a constraint you know why should I you know think about going into this industry when I don't have access to land and I won't have you know full ownership so it's it's something really interesting. I've heard it come up and continue to come up in conversations around the post 2015 and the sustainable development goal objectives and as people talk about sort of land tenure and land rights in that context kind of let's also think about sort of young people as well as as well as women. But I want to come back to you Bill Reese and all of the you know the the long the many partnerships that you've had with private sector with with companies and advising them on how to best sort of engage with youth. And so one question I have is is there any kind of single more common almost you know misconception about young people for companies or shared you know shared understanding of why it's so important to get this right when it comes to kind of young people and workforce development. Well at least to be a little provocative I'd say that global business gets youth development better than our foreign aid agencies do. There's a lot of talk about getting young people employed so they don't become terrorists or or whatever else. Global businesses though today are really run even if they're and let's say an American company but their executives are Brazilian and Egyptian and Thai and Korean and whatever and they rotate around the world and then their local staff or their dealers or their owners or their supply chains are substantial business people in their own communities they get it for particularly I think in the emerging market countries and those that have some semblance or more than even a semblance of rule of law and some sort of democratic rule failed states that's a whole other equation but businesses get it because they know that their future consumers are these young people. They know that their future employees are these young people and if they're sourcing, selling, manufacturing or whatever they're doing in whatever country they're in the stability of that country and those communities that they're working in make a huge difference in terms of their their long term sustainability as an organization if they're trying legitimately to do some triple bottom line in the community but the community is in chaos you don't have a lot of chance to do that so I think frankly global businesses get the youth issue. The question is what do you do about it because I think it's more complicated. This is one of the more complicated issues I think of getting teenagers and young adults ready for jobs that don't actually exist or don't enough jobs don't exist in economies. So what do you do about it? Quite frankly it's easier to get mother to child transmission of HIV cured it's easier to get every little girl into elementary school than it is to get 15 and 20 year olds who have dropped out of school ready for a job and a decent job in a global economy. These are these are difficult issues and I think frankly some of our foundations without mentioning any names have shied away from this because they don't see the quick win or the technological or the accountable measurable thing that you can see in three and six and 12 months that you've really made progress. Youth employability and the growth of our well let me just put it this way youth employability will not be solved if we don't have large scale economic growth. Now it needs to be broad based it needs to be inclusive and all those adjectives we put around it but economic growth has to happen or else the youth bulge will not become part of the economy and society. Again an unemployed person is not a sort of good citizen you'd like to have living next door to you for a long haul. So but we don't talk enough about economic growth in the development community. Businesses get it. Now to visit and we someone said this morning you know it's businesses who create jobs. One of my favorite quotes of a very big company that is a Fortune 100 company has put millions of dollars into job training for young people. But the executive told me once actually we were in a mixed stakeholder group like this and someone was saying well you know companies have got to create more jobs and he said I've been with my company 37 years. I've never once been in a meeting where we've talked about how can we employ more people but we do employ lots of new people as we've done over the last 25 years when our products are great our services and our sales are great we're sourcing and producing in the right places we have the credibility of the companies and the countries and the countries and communities in which we're working when that all works guess what we sell more of our stuff and we employ more people. It's a great point there was the IMF the International Monetary Fund came out with a study right at the end of 2014 and they were looking across the Eurozone which is some of you may know has had some of the highest youth unemployment across the region average 25 percent we many of us have heard the horror spiking numbers out of Greece Spain Portugal Southern Europe and they sort of looked at this crisis and build your point about the importance of sort of economic growth in general their sort of calculations if you will found that roughly half of the sort of current youth unemployment can be attributed to the economic decline in general so the downturn since the global recession so to your point that you know it is about the sort of supply and demand it is about the kind of overall pie if you will kind of getting bigger with that I'm going to go to the podium we're going to take some of your questions so I'll see you over there in a moment see everybody across the room we'll take three in the first round and then we'll take another three more we'll go with Tim Hi there Tim Nurse for Making Sense International a question for Bill Geithen to return to the question of kind of shared value in agriculture development in youth it's there's not just a shared value question there's a shared problem in terms of what the next generation is going to look for look to and how they're going to produce products that you can buy and process and in our work in agriculture we're often looking at increasing the supply of young people who are interested in agriculture you know helping become agripreneurs and in one project in Kenya we there was a shared understanding among the private sector as well as the farmers that the next generation was a critical aspect and so buyers of horticulture projects started to put pressure on some of the producer associations say are you including young people in your structure because that's one of the barriers often for young people are they existing structures whether it's land or access to resources and so I'm curious in terms of your work or other places where have you seen where the private sector can not only look at making sure the resources are available potentially even sourcing or putting criteria for sourcing from associations that include young people or from young people themselves we're going to take two more in this first round woman in front of me Michael come hello my name is Joyce holiday from the International Association of African NGOs Nicole you talked about the stigma with agriculture the stigma stems through every vocational training institution you know there needs to be a change of mindset I said that earlier in my thing and an average African parent when their children become doctors lawyers engineers pharmacists and nobody wants their kids to become a mechanic trained to become a plumber trained to become a farmer trained to become in fact they're not going to pay your school fees you know I come out of a family of eight I'm the last of eight kids all of my siblings are doctors trained in Harvard in Cambridge and I have a business degree but I'm looked upon like oh she's the challenge to one in the family because I'm not a lawyer I'm an architect so that mindset needs to be changed and I believe that vocational training institution is a key to youth employment you know I was home this December the kids that fix my phone they're two teenagers set up a shack the street corner and we're able to fix this phone without any training and I'm thinking to myself if this these kids have a short term training certification institution I mean God knows where they'll be so that the key thing is you know having more vocational training institutions on the continent to grow youth employment thank you and we'll take one more hopefully a question would be great this gentleman up in front and then we will do hopefully time for a second round hi Reed Mackie child labor coalition Bill I was interested in your comments about the professionalization of the pesticide applicators my question is is there a minimum age for that I hope and secondly you guys have been engaged in efforts to reduce hazardous child labor in cocoa for many years and I was just wondering are you seeing signs of success and what seems to be working there sure thank you I guess to answer the first question on the Kenya example sounded very interesting I'd like to learn more about that and you know we're looking in West Africa how we can develop youth groups or future farmers of Africa type programs looking at maybe even some of the successful models in the United States or elsewhere or preferably even developing countries so I know that that's a priority right now for both governments of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire in Ghana the Cocoa Marketing Board is starting a new program I think it's called Youth or Young Cocoa Farmers and they provide awards to young people and look at how they can help young people get access to land farms and to use those as models for other youth that might be interested in getting involved so I'd like to learn more about your experience and see if that might be something we could translate over into what we're doing Bill, Sherry did you just have thoughts particularly on maybe the stigma question and any comment I think you're absolutely right there's a huge stigma around vocational training I was in I think it was a high school and we went in and spoke and said how many of you guys want to be engineers everyone raised their hand how many of you guys want to be doctors how many of you guys want to be welders, mechanics no one raises their hands and then we said okay do you understand how much you can make being a welder no and then when we said how much you can make being a welder or one of those vocational trades we then said how many people want to be a mechanic the whole classroom like raises their hand so I think it's really an awareness issue and it's not just an awareness of the student I think it's a kind of whole of family because there's a lot of other people making the decisions other than the student or the job seeker so I think it's really critical that that perception shift is not just focused on the job seeker because more often they're not the decision maker and I think really being able to build that awareness in a more holistic manner and determining who is the decision maker is really critical I also think there's been a lot of successful programming of bringing kind of the families into these vocations and letting them see firsthand the growth potential, the earning potential is really really critical and I think that's where we're going to see a more successful move in perceptions and mindsets I do have a my younger daughter is in med school so you might ask who wants a $200,000 debt when you get out of school before you start that prestigious profession we've got living a few miles north of here from Friedman whom everyone knows he says you can't outsource your plumbing to India so a plumber can make a lot of money in a community like this particularly when your pipes freeze over the winter or your drain clogs up on Thanksgiving and there won't be anyone around until the next Monday what do they charge an hour for that some of it does really come down to real work and real money but I think the technical training the question was earlier how do you create some of these partnerships with big companies and co-creation, co-design co-management too is part of it we've always looked at at youth employment as a dual customer you've got the supply which are the young people who need and want jobs whether they know which place they ought to be heading or not and maybe they could go to all those different places all our kids need to go into some of those professions but it's also the demand side what do the companies need and a TVET system to do well and many do do quite well and TVET in the United States is really mostly our community colleges some of them do spectacularly well I grew up in California right next to the Stanford campus and so you had Stanford lying in football or anything else about who was the smartest but it's the junior colleges in California that probably had as much to do with California's economic boom in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s as these great universities because they were training people for real jobs in their communities when community colleges or TVET programs get that right because they have a dialogue in a relationship with their local private sector things work well and a lot of them don't and not all of our junior colleges do so I wouldn't expect a lot of the TVETs in many of these programs you've mentioned Egypt a lot there are more unemployed young Egyptians with college degrees than there are unemployed Egyptians with high school degrees so it's not just a level of education so how do people come out and are they ready to look for a job if they're well educated or do they have that mindset too or how would I interview and look beyond maybe the public sector for where they would want that job We're going to take one more round Sherry you're coming around a sort of whole family approach maybe think of a comment I often make whether it's about stigma or anything else is that I often say youth programs don't necessarily have any youth in them it might often be about educating the family a policy shift or something else that doesn't necessarily have youth and I think we need to get our minds around that a little bit more so we're going to take one more round of questions Hi excellent panel thank you so much Patricia Lange with Save the Children this is a question about urbanization and the inevitable migration that we'll all foresee so I'm wondering if any of the panel have an opinion on how we can better prepare youth who will inevitably migrate for jobs and self employment Thanks A couple more I'd love a question from one of our younger audience members if any of you are brave enough right here in front of you this young-ish younger woman Hi I'm Wei Yi my question is about the transition of economy of the Sub-Saharan Africa and the economy to knowledge economy that's not happening yet but this is the direction so how to address the gap between the demand and supply side for the current industry say the dominating agriculture and mining sectors but to a future economy say more services industry dominated so this is my question One more this woman here in the front Hi my name is Kirsten from Global Communities and my question is directed with Sheri is that how you prefer to sit you mentioned a lot of your work in Jordan and Egypt and we have my organization currently has a youth workforce development program over there and you mentioned as we also have found that soft skills are something that in future employers coming up how in the field have you seen technology used to kind of address the lack of soft skills or even appreciation for soft skills because as someone who's not too far removed from the quote-unquote youth age that you all would refer to soft skills are not something in particular that are emphasized in career preparation we almost never talk about it you're just taught to get whatever skills you need and say you have the skills and you get the job but how have you seen or how do you propose or you think we could use technology to kind of help develop an appreciation for soft skills because overall we've seen in our youth workforce development programs that they take the classes but I'm not really so sure it resonates with them all the time so yes that's it Sheri you want to start and then we'll go back on those three questions Yeah sure so I'm going to go back to gaming again because I really think it's this effective way of role playing and there have actually been a few games that simulate that interview process so you have the interviewee sit behind and be the interviewer and the person shows up late not dressed properly not even answering half the questions it's really putting them in someone else's shoes which you can do with new technology and innovative technology and building an awareness and an understanding of the criticalness to have basic business ethics, basic business behavior to dress a certain way to show up on time so there's definitely a place for that in terms of using technology to simulate and to role play I think that that's probably one of the more effective ways to get that embedded into kind of youth's mind it is very hard to sit in a classroom and say you need to show up and work on work at time another thing that a lot of people and a lot of you know research has said is that you need to embed it in the technical skills as well because when it stand alone it just doesn't make sense and it doesn't really resonate to the specifics of their specific job so I think really embedding soft skills is also something that's been successfully implemented if I could add to that you've talked about blending and weaving in some of that would be called apprenticeships or internships where you're actually learning by doing you're practicing what you learned we certainly have found in vocational training programs if you don't weave it in they don't get the soft skills but you wouldn't say we're going to now have a day of soft skills and yesterday we're going to do tech skills it's how you blend it in there are two types of training that I think go back now 60, 70 years when I was in college we had language labs you put a headset on yes you had double reel simulation that today is done on your handheld device pilots have been doing simulated training for 50, 60, 70 years so some of this stuff isn't necessarily the technology may be new but the notion of helping people learn by doing in a real, real-life, real-time situation is not necessarily new the soft skills I think have to be well defined we have to be able to get our hands around them it's easier to test a sixth grader or ninth grader in math than it is to test them in this life skill or that life skill but if we get our hands around that sort of stuff there are ways of analyzing it and then of dosing it too because why give someone or a group of people a bunch of life skills that they already do pretty well so if we can figure out how to test for some of that or analyze it and then dose it you're giving them the right skills they need you're also doing it in a cost-effective way because you're not giving a whole bunch of other stuff that they don't need great points, I mean I think it's really important as much as there is so much opportunity with technology and internet in particular in rural communities there's still major digital divide right and a lack of access in particular to the internet, mobile a lot more penetration and availability but sort of going old school whether it's in person or even radio and kind of old media and old technology I say and how we can apply those Bill, thoughts on a couple of the other questions? Yeah, there was one question at the end of the last round that I really didn't get a chance to answer so I'll try to do that best I can now on the crop life program that we're doing with the African Cocoa Initiative and really it's around both farm safety as well as looking at economic opportunities for people in rural sectors and this spray service provider initiative is looking at 18 plus year olds who would go in or who are actually going in to help provide spray services to farmers but in addition to that now they're also getting involved in other services such as pruning such as grafting and maybe even tree nurseries we're hoping down in the future so it's providing a whole another area of employment opportunities for people in the rural areas which is kind of exciting I think one of the areas that we need to invest more in though in Cocoa is looking at new technologies on labor saving Cocoa tends to be laborious it's family family operated operations for the most part but I keep thinking down the road we need to figure out how to solve that to make labor saving technologies more readily available to small scale farmers great we'll share your last thought yeah someone asked about urbanization and how do you work with rural youth labor migration I think that it's really ambitious and a lot of programs aim probably too high in getting marginalized at risk youth, youth dropouts rural youth straight into the workforce and I think that civic engagement is a really critical middle step and it can really offer an opportunity to build those life skills those kind of workforce transition skills in a less intimidating manner and I think that that's a very it's a nice next step kind of to move people from a rural into an urban setting to get at risk youth kind of slowly into the workforce and I don't I don't think those programs are really targeting enough are targeted enough as a middle step in that urbanization migration great I'm going to use that last comment and question as a chance to call up my friend and colleague and our host today Dan Rendy who if you haven't seen his terrific latest column on urbanization generally in Forbes I believe you should check it out and I'll use this last chance as also a plug we looked at a lot of the issues we talked about today and others in this report that came out last month in the SIS key considerations in youth workforce development I believe copies are still available on your way out downstairs with that quickly join me in thanking Bill Bill and Sherry who made my job extremely easy and I'm going to turn the floor back to Dan thank you thank you okay we looked at some big global challenges in the rural sector today I think one of the big takeaways is companies have a very big role to play in solving these challenges but at the same time the lens we want to engage companies on is through their creating shared value lens not their corporate social responsibility lens at the same time companies can't do this alone this requires governments and donors and civil society and I think it also requires multi-stakeholder partnerships it requires leadership so really want to thank Nestle for entrusting us with this I think this is a very interesting conversation and I'm grateful for everybody for investing the time and being with us today and thanks everybody especially the panelists and thank you to Nestle