September 15: The World Bank has approved the Youth Employment Transformation Initiative (YETI) Project which aims to improve employment opportunities and labour market outcomes in Nepal, especially for youths and women.

The World Bank posted on its website that the US$ 120 million project to support the Government of Nepal was approved on September 12.

According to the World Bank, the project aims to benefit 100,000 young people, especially women. The project which falls under the Prime Minister Employment Program (PMEP), will be implemented by the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security over a period of five years.

“The Youth Employment Transformation Initiative project is a catalyst in Nepal’s efforts to bring young people out of the cycle of poverty,” stated Idah Z Pswarayi-Riddihough, World Bank’s country director for Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. “While foreign employment has provided stable income for many rural families with remittances contributing about a quarter of Nepal’s GDP, this needs to be balanced by a stronger home-grown supply of productive jobs for Nepali youth.”

The project will work at the federal, provincial and local levels through an integrated set of demand and supply-side interventions to strengthen employment promotion systems and services and improve job outcomes and livelihoods for young men and women, World Bank further wrote on its website. 

According to the World Bank, YETI will support the 753 Employment Service Centers (ESCs) at all the local levels to provide employment promotion and employment support services for registered job seekers, and a holistic National Employment Management Information System (NEMIS) for management of data on job seekers and job-related opportunities, monitoring of progress of the project and PMEP, and evidence-based employment policy formulation.

World Bank said that the project will create temporary employment opportunities in the maintenance of public assets and provision of services to engage up to 35,000 individuals and yield about 3.5 million work-days annually. The temporary employment opportunities will be complemented by on-the-job and life skills trainings of up to 50 days per individual to improve the employability of young people in the long run.

The project will also support capacity building initiatives to facilitate effective service delivery and coordination in the new federal structure while creating synergies with the private sector and existing projects to promote employment and employment-related services.

In Nepal, most jobs are in the informal sector, the World Bank said. According to the latest labor force survey, more than 900,000 people are looking for work and almost 70 percent of these job seekers are youth.

While 11.4 percent of the Nepali population is unemployed, proportionally more young women are unemployed compared to men. By supporting the Prime Minister Employment Program, the YETI project will address existing gaps while complementing ongoing initiatives to ensure poor and vulnerable people benefit from Nepal’s labor market opportunities.