The project seeks to analyze the interrelated economic outcomes and opportunities in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia and Liberia and how aid interventions may improve both development and stability in each country.

The project will assess the stabilizing impact of two types of employment intervention: Job creation and employment training. To do so, it will first create a database of employment interventions, including their size, aims, location and success. This project will then match the database to local economic and stability indicators, which will be statistically analyzed to address four main research questions:

  1. Do interventions have short-, medium- or long-term impacts on economic opportunity or outcomes?
  2. Do interventions have short-, medium- or long-term impacts on stability, and at which levels of disaggregation? (i.e. individual, household, community).
  3. Do heterogeneous treatment effects exist? (e.g. by type of employment intervention, target group, institutional environment, etc.).
  4. What are the underlying causal mechanisms leading from interventions to improvements in stability and/or economic outcomes?

The program will include a series of workshops in communities that have been recipients of employment interventions, a private-sector-supported �?study tour’ with entrepreneurs and business leaders, and consultations with stakeholders. The first stakeholder meeting took place during a field visit to Liberia in September 2016. Preliminary data analyses were presented to several local organizations. Such participatory methods with relevant stakeholders enable the project to evaluate and disseminate the research strategy, correlating results with real-life experiences, tailoring the research to the needs of practitioners, and to have an impact on processes of capacity building and policy formulation.

Employment for Stability is funded through NWO-WOTRO in collaboration with the Knowledge Platform Security & Rule of Law, which seeks to address issues in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. The secretariat is run largely by The Hague Institute, and further cooperation manifested itself in the Platform’s annual conference in April 2016, where Employment for Stability was presented in several sessions.

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