 Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for this session. Great to have you here. I think people will continue to come on in as they finish their lunch and their coffee. And my name is Ritu Sharma. I'm a senior visiting fellow here at CSIS working on the youth prosperity and security program. And we'll say a little bit more about that as we go along, but I'm really glad to be here and be your moderator today. This is an amazing panel. I have talked with all of them before we got here. It's gonna be a very, very rich conversation. And we want to have you very much a participant in the conversation. So we'll have a little bit of go around here, a little bit of back and forth, but then we're gonna open it up fairly early on so we can get this dialogue going. First, I wanna just frame this issue of the growing global workforce a little bit. So when I say the word youth bulge, what comes to your mind? Anybody? Youth bulge, the phrase youth bulge, yeah. That's big bulge. So huge numbers of people. That's what comes to mind. Who else? Yes, sir. And so what do you think about that? With what comes to mind? What pictures? What descriptors? Okay, so where are these jobs gonna come from? Who else? Anybody else? Yes, sir. Miss matches skills. Miss matches skills. Right, yeah, big, big problem. Yes, ma'am. Yeah, huge issue. Yes. Right, so where is the, where all the secondary students go? We're gonna have a big bulge come up from primary. So I think of a lot of things when I think about youth bulge, a lot of times I think about being like nine and a half months pregnant. That's a really big bulge. So it is initial bulge, but then I believe me it leads to other bulges, so we won't go down that path, so. But one of the important things about this issue is to know that we tend to create what it is we believe, right? And if we believe that the youth bulge is a problem, and most everybody that spoke up said something along the problem category, right? We need to start thinking about youth as a huge untapped resource, a major good for global governance and national governance around the world. We need to think of them as a source for potential solutions to food and security, environmental degradation. So the point is that when we think about youth development, youth workforce development youth bulge, we tend to have a really negative connotation with that. And what we wanna try to do today with this conversation is absolutely to address the problems and the challenges. But we really want you to hear about some of the positives and some of the opportunities happening that having this huge resource like we have never seen before at our disposal. Let me introduce our amazing panelists. First to my left is Dr. Louise Crouch, currently with RTI International that Louise has worked in many places in Washington and around the world. He is probably one of the leading experts on how to change complex educational systems. He has worked on that issue at the World Bank at the Global Partnership for Education, Global Partnership for Education Secretary that usually just say GPE. And has head of the Global Good Practices Team. I'd say that's an awesome title. Love that director, Global Good Practices Team. He currently leads work on education workforce and youth and the data revolution for development. So really honored to have you Louise. Nicole Golden to my immediate left was the first director of the Youth Prosperity and Security Initiative here at CSIS. So I owe my current job to her where she created the first ever youth wellbeing index which was a really remarkable tool that ranks countries on how well they're doing across five domains of youth development and empowerment. And I'll let you explain the rest of that. She was also behind the creation of USAID's youth development policy and part of launching the task force at the Department of State that drafted that youth policy framework. So she's sort of the walking center of gravity around youth policy in the US government. To my right is Ambassador Anne Lugol Moline did I pronounce that correctly? From the Swiss, we used to call it SDC that's not correct anymore, is that right? Do you still call it SDC Swiss Development Corporation? It is now the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. I know, just say Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Okay, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And she's headed the Sub-Saharan Africa Division. She is an economist, has been with transparency international has done an incredible amount of work on good governance and anti-corruption which she's bringing to her expertise in Sub-Saharan Africa and her perspective a little bit on the Swiss system. Mr. Rob Webb is from Hyatt. We're really pleased to have him here. Hyatt is deeply engaged in CSIS and we really owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Hyatt company for their generosity. And Rob joined Hyatt in 2007 as the Chief Human Resources Officer and he is responsible for all aspects of human capital management across all the Hyatt brands globally. So just try to get your head around that. How many people is that approximately? A million people? No, 100,000. 100,000, okay, that's still a lot of employees. He came also from the financial services industry from city group, global service delivery operations with city employee services, the global consumer group and city financials, we're really honored to have you here. And to my immediate right is Dr. Luis Alfredo Maiz from Walmart, thank you for coming out from the Middle America, we appreciate it very much. And he is an expert on social impact and so it's great to have him sitting where he is at the Walmart Foundation and just to clarify that's different, not the corporation, it's the foundation. So and they work together obviously but this is a separate set of operations. He is leading the work on workforce development, looking at how to improve employment and advancement opportunities within the retail sector in the US and beyond. He comes out of our government, out of aid as the FSO and working in programs in Mexico and Peru. And was started out in Peace Corps in the DR. So thank you so much for being here, really, really appreciate your being with us. So let's begin with kind of the state of the world, Luis. And you tend to have a really great bird's eye view of educational systems, of educational quality and attainment and all of that. Give us a sense of where youth are in their education globally. Is this a good story? Is this a bad story? Is this a mixed story? And we'll talk a little bit about then are they gonna have the skills needed to fill the jobs that are out there in the future? Yeah, it's a mixed story. Access to schooling as somebody in the audience that has improved tremendously, completion rates are up but the real hang up right now that we're facing is how little the kids are right. And just to give you a couple of dumb founding statistics, the median child in the poor countries, let's say the lower income, lower middle income, the median child has a cognitive achievement level equal to the child at the 5th percentile of the developed country distribution. So the average kid learns less than the least learning 5%. That 5% would be considered learning disabled in most countries. The bottom 5% of the distribution roughly are learning disabled. So that's like saying that the majority of children in the developing world would be considered learning disabled here. So that is not progressing. And at the rate of progress in improving the skills of children, it's going to take 100 years for the developing world to catch up to where the developed world is today. But the developed world is moving along. So at the current rate of progress, there's no catch up basically. So that's a real issue. That's what one of the things that we need to be addressed at. And by the way, this is not just with academic skills. Some research I've done shows that the correlation between kids acquiring academic skills and kids acquiring problem solving and creative thinking skills is about 92%. So there's no magic or secret. The countries that are producing kids with good academic skills are also producing kids with good practical skills. There's some exceptions. And that has some implications that maybe will come out in the rest of the conversation. I'll stop there with some of the facts. Yeah, so that's a really helpful overview. We're looking at this huge learning and skills deficit, kind of the overall picture. Nicole, from your point of view, both having done really in-depth research on these issues, but you've also been able to look at some of the emerging issues. So we usually talk about vocational training and life skills development and sort of basic knowledge, but there's a whole another set of issues out there that we need to be focused on. So tell us a little bit about those. Sure, thanks. And thanks again for having me. It's great to be with you all and to be back here at CSIS. And exactly one of the projects that I worked on while I was here with support from RTI was looking at these sort of key emerging issues in workforce development among youth in particular. And that sort of got a little bit beyond the skills mismatch or the vocational training piece, which is for sure a critical factor. But there were a number of kind of top line themes, if you will, sort of emerging considerations that I'll just kind of tee up briefly because I think with our panel we can get maybe some specifics on them as well. So one was this idea, which came up from you all as well, of really understanding this, you know, meeting the supply and the demand. So it's not enough to just provide the content, what is the market demanding from these young people? Related to that, there was actually an interesting statistic I heard this week. I think Moe Ibrahim was speaking. And he said that, you know, for example, 70% of Africans make a living off of agriculture. But yet currently only 2% of students, of university students are actually studying agricultural sciences. So when we think about, again, where are the jobs? And there's a whole other set of factors we can talk about around agriculture and youth. But that's just kind of one example of where education and training are meeting supply and demand. The idea of partnering to sort of leverage resources and promote the right kind of education, promote incentives at work, which we can talk a bit more about. There's a number of interesting partnerships going on between the public and private sector. I'm sure Luis is involved in many of them. The idea of needing to know more is one that really came up. Luis just spoke to some of the data, but what we're learning is as much as we're starting to know is also as much as we don't. And it's not only about having better information on learning outcomes and where people are doing well and where they're not. So more about education quality. So what are young people learning and where are they not learning? But also more rigorous information and evaluation about what works. And I think in particular in the developing world that data question and that evaluation question is ever coming to the fore. And we can talk more about that, particularly in sort of conflict and post-conflict situations. The importance of starting young. Again, people have already spoken to the point about, yes, we're making great progress in getting through primary, starting to get there in secondary, but because of dropout issues, because of just the sheer demographics, which our colleague in the audience spoke to so many sort of still young children coming up through the system, the importance of bringing practical, entrepreneurial life skills, kind of curriculum and pedagogy into the secondary school system and not necessarily even waiting around for them to get into the vocational system is, I think, increasingly important. The importance of just a couple quick more. Engaging and involving students, I think is something that's really starting to recognize that young kids today, they think differently, they wanna have a say, and if we don't really engage them in the process, the end products, whether it's a course or the curriculum, whether it's a policy, a program, is not really going to engage them or necessarily be as responsive to their needs. And there's a couple of other emerging things we can talk a bit more about in terms of accreditation. I'd love to hear from colleagues on that and financing and how young people are financing their education. Great, great. So I think what often is happening is kids are coming out of school, they're hitting the workforce, companies like yours then have to employ them and find that you've got to fill in a lot of the gaps that they didn't get from education in addition to train them in any other way that you would. So tell us a little bit, Louise, about how you approach workforce development at Walmart. And one of the things we talked about was the critical importance of partnerships for you and getting it done. Thanks, Ritu. It's great to be back in DC. I've been with the Walmart Foundation now for close to eight months. Great. So one of the aspects, I think, of the company and the foundation, the foundation is a 501C3 and we sit in the company, I think, which is a really great advantage and a benefit that we have. One of the most impressive things has been really a true commitment to social and environmental impact that I think creates value above and beyond, it creates value for society, above and beyond what the core mission of the company is, which is to save people money so that they can live better. And I think the way that Walmart and the Walmart Foundation approach its work is in a way that's sustainable for people and the planet, in a way that creates opportunity and not only for our associates, which is what we call our employees, but also our customers and our partners and society at large and then also in a way that strengthens communities and given kind of our size, I mean, we're in 27 different countries and employed 2.2 million associates around the world and I think here in the US, I saw a statistic that 90% of the US population, was within 15 minutes of a Walmart, right? So I mean, the community is large and I think the company feels important about that. To get to the approach, so we do what's called business led philanthropy. And so essentially what we're trying to do is leverage the assets and the knowledge of the company and bring them to bear on social and environmental challenges. And through this, we're looking at areas where we can maximize impact, we're looking at obviously the double bottom line, which is, and I'm including environment in there. And so what we've decided to do with workforces in the past, we had been in different industries and it was about trying to work with our partners to equip beneficiaries to improve their economic mobility through workforce programs. But now what we've decided to do is focus in on one industry and that's retail. And it's an industry obviously that we're comfortable with and we know about. And in terms of kind of where we're at, we've got in the US, we're focused really on advancement. So folks that are already in retail and trying to advance their careers throughout the retail industry and internationally we're focused mostly on pre-employment. So it's getting that first job in retail. And finally, what we look at mostly is areas where the retail sector is growing, where there's a demand for the retail sector. We look at areas where we have partners that can help us kind of execute these programs. And finally, we look where our company is also operating and they, in each country, they have their own philanthropy and social giving agendas. And so where they kind of meet up and sync up is really where we work. Great, well we definitely wanna come back and talk about some specific examples from your work. Madam Ambassador, we talked on the phone a little bit about the Swiss system of workforce development. And so the emphasis on this in Swiss development foreign policy grows out of an emphasis of workforce development in Switzerland for your own youth. So we were, talk a little bit about what that looks like and then how does that get adapted or changed in the context of development internationally? Indeed, we talked together about the so-called Swiss vocational education system, dual system, which is made of two components. The people, the students who don't want to pursue after high school to go into university, they have the choice of joining technical schools, vocational schools for two days a week and then have their job at the same time in an enterprise for the rest of the week, over three years. And that dual model was actually built in the beginning of the 20th century in Switzerland, totally private led at first. Indeed, the craftsman at that time, for example, I don't know, welder or carpenters, they had noticed that they had problems to recruit the young people with sufficient qualities and sufficient skills. And they put their heads and resources together to actually address some kind of training by themselves to the young people. And over the years, this informal system, which was clearly private led, private sector led at the beginning, has then evolved into a partnership, a public-private partnership, where the state, and in Switzerland it's not the central state, it's the canton state, so the federal state in the US, are responsible for developing the curriculum of the technical schools, vocational schools and are doing that in partnership with the enterprises and companies in their respective economic environment. And the enterprises, they're actually participating in developing the curriculum, so that they make sure that they get the right people for their right place. And indeed, that matching between the skills that are developed and the needs of the job market makes the success of this model. And I have to say, I'm proud to say, that we have 3% of an employment rate in Switzerland. So probably that plays a role. We are not the only country having this system, Germany and Austria also has it. So now coming to development, it's not an easy system to directly transplant in developing countries, especially in countries where the central state is very heavy, because people do not understand, the administration does not understand why the private sector is involved, why there is no fiscal incentive to hire people, these things. So we have to make sure that in weak government states, the model starts up from the basis, small SMEs with few community schools, and then later on evolved into something more administratively red. And to make sure that the central state does not take the whole bulk of it and leaves the private sector out and then has actually no results. And we are very active in Africa with this and in the Balkan countries, the Swiss Development Corporation, part of the ministry of affairs, is very active in specific countries on that, because we believe that it's a good system to address the challenges that you've mentioned, the workforce, and this youth that has no job, which is actually a bomb. And in the future, if people cannot get out of poverty because they have no job and they join criminal activities or they migrate. So we are putting a lot of emphasis on that, but it's full of challenges that I can talk more about this later. Right, yes, I definitely want to come back and talk about the challenge of scale, because the challenge in front of us is to create 600 million jobs, give or take, in the next 15 years. And 15 years, just with that in perspective, that's three USAID project cycles. So for those of you who do USAID work, that is like that, it's a blink of an eye in terms of what has to get done. So, Rob, from your perspective, being head of a global, human resources for a very global corporation, we sort of talked about the global workforce and we group people together in these ways. How do you all think about your workforce? I mean, is it global? What things are common across the workforce, or is it something that's highly individualized for your company? First of all, thanks for having me. I'm, in my career, I've kind of experienced that anytime you put global in front of something, it fails. So, I try not to say global anything. We used to be called Global Hyatt, now we're called Hyatt Hotels Corporation. And I'm sure stock price has improved as a result. You know, I have three children. My children don't think of themselves as part of the global workforce. They think of themselves as I'm an individual and I'm trying to have a career and have a family and so forth. I think we would react poorly to thinking about it as a global workforce because it implies a certain homogeneous characteristic that frankly doesn't exist. And even if it did exist, people would resist it because of the sense of individualism and so on. So, any more than guests, you know, I could say there's a global group of guests and I can tell you that every single guest is different and it's our job to understand how they're different so that we can help them have a wonderful experience. It's no different with the people that work in our hotels. The colleagues that we have, 50 countries, 100,000 people, they all have their own individual circumstance needs, wants, strengths, opportunities and we have to understand that and we have to, this is where the fun comes in. We need to maintain global brands while really attracting those individuals and it's interesting, I'm always fascinated when we talk about employers getting with educators so that they'll teach the right thing which suggests that we know what needs to be taught which isn't always the case. And if it was the case, I think we would have solved this by now. But I think the, just as we kind of look at our company we look at our guests that way, we look at our colleagues that way and we have to have a system that provides individualized touch and care. Otherwise we'll get a homogenous result which is why hopefully if anyone stays in a high ed you will not have a scripted experience because people don't have scripted lives. They don't, life is usually not a straight line. My life is very scripted. You're a very fortunate woman. Mine's not. But that's the fun, that's why being part of the people's side of the business, that is the business. And it's different from, I think we have our second hotel open in Tanzania now and then you can go to Park Hyatt, Washington DC. It's a brand, different people, different experience for the individuals, perhaps different guests, global guests. So it's fun. Lots of other things I can say because I'm not burdened with the knowledge that you have. I'm not burdened with the knowledge that you have. Louis carries it very well. Louis carries it very well. He's very distinguished with his knowledge. One of the things that I think about a lot is what is the incentive for developing country governments who are host to the bulge mostly, right? It's developing countries. What is their incentive to invest in this area because where jobs are limited and it's a competitive process, sort of bringing up the quality of education across the country will actually just create more competition for fewer jobs. And this is an area where donor countries, civil society, local populations and corporations actually can make common costs to sort of bring pressure on a national government to think about these things. Just curious, Nicole and Louis, from your perspective and Ambassador, as you engage with developing countries, tell us about how you go about getting countries to invest more. Or are they already there? They're ready to do it. And it's just a matter of figuring out what's the best way. Sure, I'll start. Just a few thoughts. I mean, I think it's a great question. And I think many of them are there. I mean, I think there's the will and it's trying to find the way, especially in, as you said, in developing countries where public resources and budgets are so constrained, which is, again, where the partnership really comes into play. But I think if they're not there or one of the things that gets them there is this idea of competitiveness. I mean, I think we've seen that a lot, I think in particularly in some of the South American countries that have come along. And if you're thinking about, I'd love to hear our corporate colleagues' perspective, but if you're thinking about attracting foreign direct investment, obviously having a skilled workforce is a big piece of that. And being able to sort of absorb and fill the jobs and the supply chains and all that. So I think that's a piece of it. And then another link into, which has already been mentioned and come up early this morning, the security side and just the more that you have young people that are productively engaged in a positive way, the less likely, and there's obviously this is making a fairly simple statement, but they're hopefully less likely to be otherwise engaged, whether it's in illicit economies or in other unproductive, even criminal or in some cases, extreme or terrorism activities. So I think from a just a stability and security perspective, there's certainly an interest there. So we'll sort of leave it at that. So competitive meant with security, two big motivators. Well, I think the, yeah, I would agree that in a lot of cases, the motivation is there. And even in a lot of cases, the money is increasingly there. And anyway, the correlation between how much countries spend on skilling programs and how successful the programs are, is not very high. At best around 0.2 or 20%. So it's much more about how the money is spent and the wisdom that is used in tracking results. So for example, I go around the developing world and I'll ask a technical college, do you know what the job placement rate of your college is? How successful are you in getting your kids employed? No idea. Probably 90% of the time that I've asked that question, the college has no idea. And when they do have an idea, it's about 10 or 20%. So if you're not managing to results, you can put a lot of money into something and it'll just disappear. So the biggest constraint is not the will. I think the country is, because they want to compete, because they know that if they don't invest them, China's gonna eat their breakfast. The will is there, the money's there. What's missing is the kind of systems to track results, to link up with the private sector and understand what they need. And kind of the systems that would in a sense, compel, and that's not too strong a word, compel the colleges to track their outcomes and to know whether their kids are getting jobs or not and then face some accountability if their placement rate is only 10%. Right, so it sounds like maybe they need a more of a business-like approach and a better set of incentive to sort of get this right. Ambassador, do you wanna add on this from your perspective? I can definitely add that the willingness is there because we are definitely overwon by demands from many, many countries over the world. I would disagree with you that the resources are there, the financial resources are not there or they have to be taken from somewhere, health sector or whatever, a different sector, but the money is not really there. But they face other types of challenges when they want to implement and if they were having the will to implement such a system, they are lacking the links to the private sector. That private sector is largely informal. So actually how do you tackle it? How do you identify it? What are they need? You cannot have those information. They're struggling with the certification system to bring it to a certain standards level and they're struggling with a mentality issue where the majority of people think that if their kids go to university and get a job at the public administration, this is the best. All the rest is not valid. So that cultural issue is a real challenge for them. Absolutely, absolutely. So from your private sector perspective, the both of you have worked it. I love your socks, by the way. Those are really very bold. Very bold. Pirate socks. So from your perspective on this, how do you see the willingness or interest of governments in developing countries? Are they coming to you saying we want to engage, please help us or are you having to kind of push it out there? Yeah, so you had alluded to in the first question about partners, right? And so I think for us we really kind of leaned heavily on the different partners that we have in these countries that where we're going to work and where we're going to work. And do you partner with the government? Is that a big part of it? So what we do is we partner with different international NGOs. We'll partner with local organizations and essentially I think one of the criteria that I mentioned earlier in terms of deciding where the Walmart Foundation is going to invest in workforce efforts, one of them was the potential to scale, right? And so we've seen in some of the countries where we've worked so far, particularly in Latin America, Mexico, Argentina and in Chile, that there are kind of vibrant government programs that are already kind of underway, that have recognized and that are trying to address some of the challenges that have been discussed so far. And what we'll do is we'll kind of leverage our resources and kind of in a certain degree support or piggyback onto a program that's already happening. So for example, in Chile right now, Chile has a program with their, what's a sensei is kind of the national training entity. And what they're doing is they've recognized kind of the need and the challenge facing the needies or those who don't have jobs and those who aren't in school. And what they've done is they have a program that is a workforce vocational type program where they have their own goals by 2018. They need to train a certain number of women, a certain number of youth. And so what we've been able to do is basically include a retail component within that. So right now they're working in a couple of different sectors. And so what we're doing is we're introducing this retail component. And what's great is, is hopefully, by the end of this initiative, which is a two year program that we have there, they will have the curriculum and they will be able to kind of move that forward so that capacity is kind of there when the program is over. So that they can continue training on retail and really meet the need in Chile because the retail sector is growing at 12.8% there whereas kind of compared to kind of all other industries which is about 6%. So we see kind of potential there. Yeah. Great, Rob, do you wanna speak to this question? Sure, I think collaboration is incredibly important. I think that by design or by happenstance, I can't imagine that I would be sitting here with this particular group of people, yet we all share a common interest but we all rarely get a chance to come together. So when we are in China, for example, the work that we're doing there, we'll partner with the university. So we have a hotel in Shaotan that is a teaching hotel. So it's a partnership with the owner of the hotel. Can we stay there for free? No, you can't stay there for free, but I'm sure you can, but you can teach. The owner of the hotel, the university and Hyatt as the management company have come together and we're providing that experience for the people. In Sao Paulo, where we have some development underway, we'll work with YCI and the lender that is funding the deal. And we go to the favelas and we train people in how to function and thrive within the hotel environment. Doing the same thing in Vietnam. Two weeks ago, interestingly, the ambassador of France asked to meet with us to ask how it was doing business in France and how could they be more supportive of our efforts there. So, but it's still too infrequent. It's still too formal. And I think that's one of the problems when it's interesting, just as I've been sitting here listening to the educational system, maybe we've made it too segmented. Maybe we should think of work as late adult education. Instead of early childhood education, kind of primary middle school, then you stop, then you go get a job. Because that's not what happens. But we've separated them so that that's their concern and this is our concern. And that's not very collaborative. Yeah, that's very, very insightful and helpful. I'm gonna, let's open it up to you because there's a lot of questions and we've got about 20 minutes left. So make it a conversation. I'm gonna take three questions at a time. So, and if you would please identify yourself, please phrase your intervention as a question. We'd be grateful for that and to keep it short. So, one, two, three, and then I'll move to this side. Okay, my name is Kevin Wentz, I'm a retired Navy captain. I'm on a Finnish church aid, which is a big charity in Finland. Actually the solution is more high hotels, more Walmarts, everybody I've employed, it'd be great, right? But my question is, as a US company, as you know, US based companies, how do you, in foundations, how do you balance the international need and the US domestic need because there's plenty of groups here going to you all for help? I can. We're gonna take three questions. Oh, first. Okay, gotcha. Battle. Hello, my name is Phyllis Klein, I'm with Fab Lab DC, which is part of the Fab Lab Global or International Project, which highly values local economies and individuals and learning that comes in many informal ways, hands-on and self-motivated. And in listening to the combinations of things today about individuals, also about workforce, where we're thinking of broad bulges and how to plug them in on the other end in this changing world, by the time they get to the other end, things have changed anyway. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are about human-centered education, thinking about individuals, what motivates them, how can we train problem solvers that will fit into a number of places on that other side that are the continuum of lifelong learners? So anyway, that's my question. Great question. And then last question here for now. Yes, good afternoon. My name is Amy Johnson. I'm an international community development consultant and also returned Peace Corps volunteer. So have to give that shout out. I'm really interested in this co-construction of the learning environment that I think you all talked about sort of the reverse matriculation of the adult learning methodologies. So I'm interested to hear more about that and what you found in terms of how that may or may not lead to more successful learnings. But I'm more interested in the concept of, or I guess how different educational systems or different educational structures might influence the learning environment. I'm thinking in particular, where there's a strong central government, I think as somebody mentioned, versus something where you have a more collaborative education system, perhaps where the government and the churches are working together or the government and other institutions might be stronger partners in learning. So any view on this US need versus domestic need, human centered education structure and learning outcomes, lots of good questions. Anybody? Go ahead. I could start. And I'm not as sufficiently expert to address all of those. So just the one on local versus central, my impression is that certain functions of a good skill system should be central. Or it depends on the size of the country, obviously. But certain functions need to be highly local. And so for example, certain types of standard setting, methods for, in essence, compelling, and I don't think that's too strong a word, but for compelling colleges to be accountable to the citizens and to the communities. And so on need to be, so in essence you have a kind of central machinery or system that compels colleges to be accountable to their own communities so that the delivery and the interaction is very local. But as I said in one of my illustrations, sometimes the colleges don't deal with the community because they don't want to, it's harder work, it's better just to show up every day and teach with the same old machine that's been there for 30 years. So it's odd, but you in essence need the power of the central government to almost kind of create an environment where colleges feel compelled to deal properly with their communities. I, you know, another example would be in a country where I worked, where, you know, just doing some simple numbers, I noticed that in one province or one district actually, the colleges had a thousand times more raw material supply for the youth to work with than the colleges in the next door, in another district in the same country. And I went to the government, the central government, and I said, did you know this? Why do these guys have a thousand times more gasoline than? And they said, A, we had never calculated that figure, B, we don't know why that is the case now that you have shown it to us. And that gives me a chance to slip in a little bit on the question of money. Because maybe I misspoke, Madam Ambassador, I didn't really mean to say the money is all there. What I meant to say is, I don't think you can lead with the money because it's like trying to pump a tire that has a leak. You know, you can put in the air, but if it's leaking out, you're not gonna make much progress. And when you have a system that will give the colleges in one province a thousand times more gasoline than another, and you just pump money at a system like that, it's not gonna be very efficient. Or it's not gonna be very fair either, very just. Sure, on the, to the question about U.S. and kind of international and efforts and investments. So I think that I wanna start with this and just kind of saying that there's a difference between kind of Walmart and Walmart Foundation's kind of efforts, right? So I mean, Walmart, as some of you may know, kind of made an important announcement recently about internal focus, about kind of our workforce and kind of enhancing the associate experience and what grab the headlines is pay, right? But there were a lot of other kind of components to it, scheduling and career pathways, which is something that directly relates to what we're doing on the foundation side. But to that same point, what was also probably lost in this announcement recently was the Walmart Foundation's $100 million five-year commitment here in the U.S. So kind of to advance retail workers and improve their economic mobility. And essentially what we're trying to do is take frontline workers across the retail industry. So this is not Walmart specific. So across the retail industry and advance them to higher positions within retail. And I think that particularly here in the U.S., retail doesn't necessarily have the best connotation in terms of an industry that you can make your career in. And if you look at it, in Walmart in our stores, 75% of our store management started as hourly workers, including our CEO, right? So I mean, it's there, that story is there, but we need to kind of in a certain degree kind of professionalize the sector. So we have that U.S. internal for Walmart. We have the U.S. external for Walmart. And in terms of our international external, we have an initiative that's called the Women's Economic Empowerment Initiative. So this is one of our other core areas. We're working not only in retail, but also with women. And so in this particular initiative, we have a goal to train 200,000 women for their first job in retail. So this is something that's purely philanthropic. And again, it's industry-wide and it's focused in on pre-employment. So it's not necessarily advancement within the industry. It's getting your foot in the door. Right, yeah, please. Just to add on the central versus local-led edification system, maybe just one additional element. I think it's a combination of both. Very concretely, the technical schools or the vocational schools have to be close to the economic reality where they are in. So they have to be locally empowered and they have to run the system. But the certification system should be at central level. Otherwise, you have no possibility for those young people being getting out of school somewhere to be hired in another part of the country. So it's definitely a good combination. Lifelong learning for professors should also be probably at central level. According to the various structures of countries, I think this is adaptable, but specific to those. So there's a certain quality control and accountability that's lodged at the central level. Yeah. Anybody else wanna talk about any of the other questions before we go? How quickly we're in on the human centered, which I don't know if this is exactly what you're asking about, but I think you mentioned the word sort of skills in your comment question. And it speaks a little bit to this, which is I think one of the things that are common and while I agree to sort of rob that it, the global workforce isn't necessarily very global. It is very sort of country level, regionalized, even at the community level. But one of the things that we're starting to really take, that's being taken note of is the kind of skills beyond, as you said, the sort of academic or content skills, and Luis mentioned this, but the soft skills, the life skills, even going into the employability skills. And I think one of the things that we're trying to start to get a better sense of is not only what those are, what really are the key skills that employers need beyond maybe a technical or a job specific skill that are trans, transversal if you will, or applicable to a variety of contacts and a variety of jobs. Because unlike sort of even my dad who's been with the same company for 40 years, the gig economy of today, right? They're unlikely to have a job for more than a couple of years and I think that trend is only gonna increase for young people. So what are these skills? How do you teach them? And then how do you know, to Luis's point, how do you know if you're actually being successful? So just sort of put that in, because I think that is one of the common threads that we are seeing around the world, right? Very quick. But with technology, a lot of it is meaning fewer jobs for very specialized people. What if we're training people not for jobs, but for life and to your point earlier about all the positive talent and resources these young people have to create their own jobs? Isn't the future about creating your own job and opportunities and not expecting that there's one waiting for you at the other end? Yeah, I think, well, let me get some questions from this side and we'll fold that in. One, two, three. Thank you for this discussion. I don't even know where to begin. I'm Barbara Simmons. I'm Dean of International Education at Tubman University in Liberia. I'm a native Philadelphian and I can recall getting very good grades when I was in school and city of Philadelphia and then we moved to the suburbs and then I went to a D. So I see the problem, it's really, sorry, global in terms of how do we go about educating to have persons who can do what we need to get done into society. So, and it's not rocket science. All the research that I've seen says you can predict how well students will do by the teachers. So how can we all come together and there's all the talk about public-private partnerships, but it's, I think we need to start seeing that we are all in this together. Hopefully Ebola at least taught us that, that we're one world. I just wanted to sort of piggyback with your comment. I work with the United States Department of Labor, International Labor Affairs Bureau, and also return Peace Corps. I worked in Morocco with youth, doing a lot of entrepreneurship activities, but you can't just teach entrepreneurship and skills and then just have a job waiting. I think that's been established with a lot of evidence. You also need to have jobs that have workers' rights and decent work attached to that. And part of having youth being able to seek those jobs is also educating them on their rights while they're getting these skills and education. I'd like to hear any of your comments about international labor standards. Great, great, good question. Jack Warner, might as well mention I'm also a former Peace Corps operator, but my more of a standards question, I'm also affiliated with the American National Standards Institute from the Institute for Sustainable Power. There's the issue out there in terms of certificates being issued in certification programs, and I'm just wondering what you all see in terms of the value of certificates that are coming from training institutions that maybe teach a specific course on one thing to give people a little bit more knowledge, but then also the full certification program when an individual goes through and gets certified, they have the right skills, knowledge, and abilities to do the position. So what do you see in terms of the value of those two activities? And then as an add on to that, what do you see in terms of the value that those certification and certificate programs are accredited by a third party to show that what they're doing in terms of the training institutions that they are teaching to a very specific job task analysis and are teaching the proper skills, knowledge, and abilities per person so that when they get through that course, they know what they're learning. Great. So we have about four minutes left and I promise the ambassador we would end on time. So if we could just go down the row here with some answers to the questions and wrap up comments in 140 characters, please. I guess I'll take one question. I think certificates are good when they're good. I mean, if they are actually measuring what the companies need, then good. But a lot of certificates are just paper. So it really depends on the quality. And sometimes certificates are used to keep people out of employment. Some of our standards in this country, you have to get a certificate after studying for two years just to, I don't know what it is, paint people's nails. I mean, that's kind of silly. And it's often used more to monopolize the trade rather than as a force for good. Great. I'll just quickly comment on just technology. And I think yes, I mean to a certain degree, technology is supplanting certain jobs, but at the same time it's creating so much more opportunity in terms of a different set of jobs. It is, can be a tool for education and expanding opportunity for information, sharing about jobs, being a bridge so that young people know more about the opportunities. So sort of leave it at that. But I think, let's think about the opportunity technology as well as some of the challenges associated with it. Great. You stole my question. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Different words to say on it. No, I'm too. So I'll go with the Department of Labor. So just very briefly, we work, our approach is different in terms of curriculum, depending on the country that we're in, the partners that we're working with, what already exists. Is there a retail federation? Do they have credentials? Do they have curriculum? Excuse me? We're working as well as we can. Correct. Now, what we're kind of focused in Latin America is the curriculum that we've used was started in Brazil and it was called the Social School of Retail. And I won't go into too many of the specifics, but one of the modules in there was civics, kind of ethics. Where can you go to vote? What can you, what's your role? And it included a lot of this information. So obviously we had the hard skills in terms of retail. We had the power skills and leadership and these types of things. But then we also had, how do you comport yourself? How do you function in society? So it's something that we've tried to address to a certain degree as well. Great. A couple of wrapping down two issues. The accreditation by a third party. Why not? Of course it would be good, but in a system where you have scarce and resources, still resources but scarce, it's probably a luxury to have it, but as a next step for sure. And on the ILO standards, I would definitely recommend to have in those technical vocational schools, and I think it's the reality in most countries where we are engaged, civics and humanist topics also complementing the technical, purely technical and entrepreneurial skills. Great, thank you. I have a longer answer that I'll save if you ever invite me back. But the, We'll invite you. In this industry, hospitality is only local. Everything's local about hospitality. So what we do has to matter in that community. That community has to be better because we're in that community. And there's ripple effects in terms of employment. Human centered design for education. Human centered design for hotels. Ethnographic study that shows us how people want to experience. We can't tell people how to experience. We can't tell employees how to experience the workplace. We have to provide an environment where they can choose what makes sense. What we find from an educational perspective now in terms of sustainable education is more around design thinking. And even arguably more so than MBAs when you get into a corporate role that if you can reimagine things with that kind of design lens, then that will cause your skills to be sustainable. You can be skilled and no one wants it. They don't have value, right? But if you have something that continues to have value that's sustainable, then that's a good place to be. Wherever you are. In terms of accreditation, unfortunately I've been in HR for such a long time. I've seen really great people who have accreditation and have a certificate fail in a particular circumstance. And I've seen them succeed and flourish in that circumstance. Doesn't mean that they're bad or that the accreditation was bad. It might mean that they were in the wrong company, the wrong environment. That they had the wrong expectation for the workplace. So fit, even though we talk about fit, fit is what it's all about. If you're not, you can't, I don't know if you can teach people to be caring, but if you can, please let me know where that school is. Because those are the people that we want. That's the fundamental. It's the school of mom. That's the school of mom. Bringing it back to the bulge. By the way, when you talked about the youth bulge, I immediately went to future consumers. Oh, that's good, good. And how will they expect to experience the workplace and hotels? Yeah. Well, thank you all. I hope we can come back and have a conversation about the supply side of jobs because that is a huge issue. And one that is not just for corporations, but is for development professionals and governments to really seriously consider how to, how to stoke the economy to create the jobs that people who are low skilled can enter. So for the next conversation, we'll do that. Thank you all very much. I hope you enjoyed the discussion today. Thank you.