YouMatch – Toolbox Project

Bringing young people into employment is one of the central issues to be tackled worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean region. Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries have rapidly growing working-age populations, with 33%-50% of the region’s population under the age of 30.

Currently, there is a mismatch between labour supply and demand, caused in part by a lack of effective job guidance and matching mechanisms in the labour market, contributing to high unemployment rates among young people.

The Global Initiative on Innovative Labour Market Services for Youth – YouMatch focuses on the link between labour supply and demand with the aim of improving job matching for young people. The project addresses the challenge of bringing young people, especially young women, into sustainable employment and aims to offer them long-term prospects through innovative solutions. YouMatch offers stakeholders from labour ministries, business associations, civil society organisations and employment promotion programmes a platform to discuss the success factors of existing youth employment services. It helps to identify good examples, further develop and implement innovative labour market solutions, transfer tailored models to different countries and share lessons learnt. To support this process, a toolbox was developed together with the participants of the platform through the YouMatch – Toolbox project.

In order to achieve sustainable results, the process incorporated the expertise, knowledge and experience of international organisations, participating countries, and other areas around the world.