Education For Employment: Market Needs And Skill Gap Assessment In Yemen

The Client’s main goal in this initiative is to ensure that education leads to improved employment prospects, whether in attractive and sustainable jobs or in self-employment. In terms of its scope and priorities, the E4E initiative is focused on matching the skills taught to young people to those in demand by employers. This initiative will be closely aligned to work going on to support increased growth of sectors that have employment potential.

The objective of this assignment is to assess the market needs and the skill gaps of the three pre-identified sectors for this project; in addition to IFC actions that may contribute to the realization of the broader goal described above. This project is expected to focus on one sector, with a possibility of two sectors.

Preliminary research indicates that the fields of construction, finance and health care are the three sectors where jobs are growing, locally and in the Gulf, and also where there is a skill gap that needs to be addressed.

For the purpose of this assignment, we are focused on post-secondary education, which includes technical and vocational training, work-readiness, and reskilling programs.  In addition, the program supports education for self-employment/entrepreneurship.

Our consultants performed the following activities:

• Reviewed existing government- and private-sector led initiatives that are relevant to this topic, and specifically the three identified sectors.
• Developed the E4E key stakeholder map of Yemen spanning youth, government, private sector, education providers, civil society, media, and donors.
• Mapped current stakeholder activity, including donors, against the priority sectors.
• For each sector, identified:
  • Current employment numbers by skill level, in and outside Yemen;
  • Potential job opportunities by skill level in and outside Yemen, for the next five years;
  • Skill gap that needs to be addressed to take up these job opportunities.
• Identified the extent to which the industry in each priority sector is organized and has the capacity to undertake the necessary action to continue the identification of the skill gaps and to address it.
• Engaged with national leadership and key influencers to support identification of issues, solutions as well as potential champions for reform efforts.
• Identified the top bottlenecks and constraints that, if alleviated, would have the maximum impact on realizing the strategic goals of the project within the selected sectors

Solutions Development phase:

• For each priority industry sector, we identified an E4E solution, i.e. a project idea that would address the specified constraints within the IFC model framework.
• Within the solutions, we documented the following:
  • Potential client and partner to implement the solution.
  • Other relevant stakeholders, and their roles.
  • Cost/budget estimate for each solution.
  • Impact targets for the E4E priority sectors.
  • Assess the willingness and ability of the private sector in priority industries to participate in the E4E space in the form of dialogue and financial contribution, especially within the context of vocational training.
  • Recommend ways to create this dialogue and develop a business case for industry contribution by drawing on successful countries experience and tailoring them to the Yemeni context.
  • Address the issue of affordability within these solutions.
• Mapped current stakeholder activity against the solutions such that total efforts are cumulative and complementary.
• Developed an implementation plan for one possible intervention for one of the sectors selected