Browsing by Author "Rasul, Imran"

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    Empowering Adolescent Girls in Uganda
    (Africa Region Gender Practice, 2013) Bandiera, Oriana; Buehren, Niklas; Burgess, Robin; Goldstein, Markus; Gulesci, Selim; Rasul, Imran; Sulaiman, Munshi
    The productive potential of adolescent girls in Uganda is critically limited by the reciprocal relationship between low health, education and employment indicators. With little incentive to attain relevant skills training, girls choose to have children early and become engaged in risky behavior, further hampering their ability to generate income. To address these challenges, we evaluated the impact of a BRAC program that simultaneously provided livelihoods training to run small-scale enterprises, and education on health and risky behaviors. After tracking 4,888 girls over a period of two years, we found that the program had strong positive impacts on economic, health and agency outcomes for the girls. The program increased the likelihood of participants engaging in income-generating activities by 32%; self-reported routine condom use by those who were sexually active increased by 50%; fertility rates dropped by 26%; and there was a 76% reduction in adolescent girls reporting having had sex against their will during the past year.
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    The Labor Market Impacts of Soft Skills Certificates
    (Growth and Labor Markets in Low Income Countries Programme, 2018) Bassi, Vittorio; Nansamba, Aisha; Rasul, Imran
    Unemployment and underemployment are key policy challenges in the developing world, and particularly in Africa, where the number of unemployed individuals is projected to increase by 1.1 million per year, and where the number of workers earning less than $3.10 per day is expected to rise by 3.9 million in 2018 alone [ILO 2017]. Understanding which factors contribute to high unemployment levels and low wages is thus of primary importance for informing the design of development policies in Africa and elsewhere. In this policy brief we report the findings from a labor market intervention we conducted in Uganda to study whether difficulties workers face in signaling their soft skills to potential employers reduce the employment opportunities of young workers and contribute to their low wages. Our headline results show that workers receiving a certificate on soft skills did not increase their probability of employment, but earned 11% more while employed in the two years post intervention.
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    Tackling youth unemployment: Evidence from a labor market experiment in Uganda
    (Wiley, 2020-11) Alfonsi, Livia; Bandiera, Oriana; Bassi, Vittorio; Burgess, Robin; Rasul, Imran; Sulaiman, Munshi; Vitali, Anna
    We design a labor market experiment to compare demand- and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries. The experiment tracks 1700 workers and 1500 firms over four years to compare the effect of offering workers either vocational training (VT) or firm-provided training (FT) for six months in a common setting where youth unemployment is above 60%. Relative to control workers, we find that, averaged over three post-intervention years, FT and VT workers: (i) enjoy large and similar upticks in sector-specific skills, (ii) significantly improve their employment rates, and (iii) experience marked improvements in an index of labor market outcomes. These averages, however, mask differences in dynamics: FT gains materialize quickly but fade over time, while VT gains emerge slowly but are long-lasting, leading VT worker employment and earning profiles to rise above those of FT workers. Estimating a job ladder model of worker search reveals the key reason for this: VT workers receive significantly higher rates of job offers when unemployed, thus hastening their movement back into work. This likely stems from the fact that the skills of VT workers are certified and therefore can be demonstrated to potential employers. Tackling youth unemployment by skilling youth using vocational training pre-labor market entry therefore appears to be more effective than incentivizing firms through wage subsidies to hire and train young labor market entrants.