Download - Youth Economic Opportunities

Washington, DC | September 10-12, 2013 A quarterly journal published by MIT Press 

innovations 

TECHNOLOGY | GOVERNANCE | GLOBALIZATION 

Youth and Economic Opportunities 

Produced in partnership with Making Cents International and the Citi Foundation 

Lead Essays 

Arnest Sebbumba Finding the Word for Entrepreneur in Luganda 

Judith Rodin & Eme Essien Lore Rethinking Youth Opportunity 

Ángel Cabrera & Callie Le Renard “Go to college...!” 

Stan Litow Innovating to Strengthen Youth Employment 

Carl Schramm University Entrepreneurship May Be Failing 

Case Narrative 

Jacob Korenblum Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune 

Martin Burt The “Poverty Stoplight” Approach 

Kevin McKague et al. Reducing Poverty by Employing Young Women 

Nell Merlino Cracking the Glass Ceiling and Raising the Roof 

Shai Reshef Going Against the Flow in Higher Education 

Fiona Macaulay A World of Opportunity 

Analysis and Perspectives on Policy 

Nicholas Davis et al. | Trina Williams Shanks et al. | Ann Cotton 

Michael Chertok & Jeremy Hockenstein | Akhtar Badshah & Yvonne Thomas 

Jamie M. Zimmerman & Julia Arnold | John Owens 

Beverly Schwartz & Deepali Khanna | James Sumberg & Christine Okali 

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL CHALLENGES

innovations 


Introductory Essays 

5 Guest Editor’s Introduction 

Making Cents International and Citi Foundation 

7 Investing in the Economic Progress of Youth 

Jasmine Thomas 

Lead Essays 

13 Finding the Word for Entrepreneur in Luganda 

Arnest Sebbumba 

19 Youth Opportunity: Rethinking the Next Generation 

Judith Rodin and Eme Essien Lore 

27 “Go to college, young men and women, go to college!” 

Ángel Cabrera and Callie Le Renard 

35 Innovating to Strengthen Youth Employment 

Stanley Litow 

43 University Entrepreneurship May Be Failing Its Market Test 

Carl Schramm 

Case Narratives 

49 Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune: How Youth-Led Startups 

Are Redefining Entrepreneurship 

Jacob Korenblum 

Fundación Paraguaya 

55 The “Poverty Stoplight” Approach to Eliminating 

Multidimensional Poverty: Business, Civil Society, and 

Government Working Together in Paraguay 

Martin Burt 

Special Issue for the 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference

Hathay Bunano 

77 Reducing Poverty by Employing Young Women: Hathay 

Bunano’s Scalable Model for Rural 

Production in Bangladesh 

Kevin McKague, Samantha Morshed, 

and Habibur Rahman 

Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence 

97 Cracking the Glass Ceiling and Raising the Roof 

Nell Merlino 

University of the People 

109 Going Against the Flow in Higher Education: 

Deliberately Including those Previously Excluded 

Shai Reshef 

Making Cents International 

125 Toward a World of Opportunity 

Fiona Macaulay 

Analysis 

149 TEN Youth: Unlocking Enterprise Growth by Focusing on 

the Fortune at the Bottom of the Talent Pyramid 

Nicholas Davis, Ebba Hansmeyer, Branka Minic, 

Shantanu Prakash, and Subramanian Rangan 

167 Financial Education and Financial Access: Lessons 

Learned from Child Development Account Research 

Trina R. Williams Shanks, Lewis Mandell, 

and Deborah Adams 

Perspectives on Policy 

185 Sourcing Change: Digital Work Building Bridges 

to Professional Life 

Michael Chertok and Jeremy Hockenstein 

197 YouthSpark and the Evolution of a Corporate 

Philanthropy Program 

Akhtar Badshah and Yvonne Thomas 

211 It’s All About the Jobs 

Jamie McAuliffe, Jasmine Nahhas di Florio, 

and Pia Saunders

227 Who Teaches Us Most About Financial Programing 

in Africa 

Ann Cotton 

241 Hope or Hype Five Obstacles to Mobile Money 

Innovations for Youth Financial Services 

Jamie M. Zimmerman and Julia Arnold 

255 Future Forward: Innovations for Youth Employment 

in Africa 

Beverly Schwartz and Deepali Khanna 

267 Young People, Agriculture, and Transformation in 

Rural Africa: An “Opportunity Space” Approach 

James Sumberg and Christine Okali 

279 Offering Digital Financial Services to Promote Financial 

Inclusion: Lessons We’ve Learned 

John Owens 

About Innovations 

Innovations is about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. 

The journal features cases authored by exceptional innovators; commentary and 

research from leading academics; and essays from globally recognized executives and 

political leaders. The journal is jointly hosted at George Mason University's School of 

Public Policy, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and MIT's Legatum Center 

for Development and Entrepreneurship. Topics of interest include entrepreneurship 

and global development, the revolution in mobile communications, global public 

health, water and sanitation, and energy and climate. 

Authors published in Innovations to date include three former and one current head of 

state (including U.S. Presidents Carter and Clinton); a Nobel Laureate in Economics; 

founders and executive directors of some of the world’s leading companies, venture 

capital firms, and foundations; and MacArthur Fellows, Skoll awardees, and Ashoka 

Fellows. Recently the journal has published special editions in collaboration with the 

Clinton Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation, 

Ashoka, the Lemelson Foundation, and Social Capital Markets. 

Subscribe at 

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/innovations

Making Cents International and 

Citi Foundation 

Introduction to the Special Issue 

This youth-focused double issue is the product of a shared passion to improve 

livelihoods and economic opportunities among the world’s 1.8 billion youth. The 

publication is particularly timely given the increased focus being given to programming, 

funding, and research on the contributions of young people in a time 

of economic volatility. As the economy shows signs of recovery, the International 

Labor Organization reports that the global rate of youth unemployment hovers 

around 13%, just below the jobless rate at the peak of the crisis—this still represents 

an estimated 73 million young people. Despite staggering unemployment, 

our concern is not the scale of the problem. Instead, we are encouraged by the scale 

of the opportunity before us. 

With the support and collaboration of the Citi Foundation, Making Cents 

International will leverage this Innovations issue as well as the annual conference, 

funder meetings, “Apply It!” webinars, blogs, crowd-sourced solution events, and 

other tools to engage a global network of partners to galvanize dialog, collaboration, 

and knowledge-building toward a collective global agenda for youth. 

Through its Collaborative Learning and Action Institute (Co-Lab), Making Cents 

will promote and improve economic opportunities for youth around the world. 

This year, the Co-Lab aims to strengthen knowledge management in the field, 

enhancing the scope and depth, diversity, and quality of how and what our people 

learn. Co-Lab gives our stakeholders and partners a new platform to both add 

value and benefit from knowledge management that translates ideas into solutions. 

The following collection of analyses, research, and remarkable stories is a part 

of our new vision. In searching for authors, we weren’t searching for all the 

answers. We looked across diverse sectors for authors who could connect disparate 

concepts, innovations, theories, stories, or research results that move the youth 

economic opportunities agenda forward. 

To highlight a few authors, first and foremost, we hear the voices of young people 

describing the hard work, ambition, fortitude, and support needed from others 

to bring innovations to old problems. Arnest Sebbumba, a young farmer, takes us 

into rural Africa and reveals the choices, challenges and opportunities facing agricultural 

entrepreneurs in Uganda. Social entrepreneur and Founder of Souktel, 

Jacob Korenblum, shares the thrills and spills of navigating entrepreneurship and 

identifying new opportunities in conflict-environments. 

© 2013 Making Cents International and Citi Foundation 

innovations / 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference 5

Featuring best practices and innovations in youth employment, Jamie 

McAuliffe’s case study of Employment for Education demonstrates how the NGO 

created a youth jobs model that reverses conventional supply-driven education 

processes that often widens unemployment. Meanwhile, Michael Chertok and 

Jeremy Hockenstein, of Digital Divide Data, highlight a growing $300 billion business 

process outsourcing industry, and the economic potential of Impact Sourcing 

as a “game-changer” for scaling 

skilled jobs among youth. 

Innovations aimed at increasing 

financial education, access, and inclusion 

among young people is critical. 

Research from Jamie Zimmerman 

and Julia Arnold of the New America 

Foundation chronicles various models 

that incorporate mobile technology 

into youth financial services programs, 

illustrating both the promise 

and, notably, high-cost and regulatory 

barriers to implementation. 

Underscoring the critical role of 

the private sector, Branka Minic, Nicholas Davis, and Ebba Hansmeyer and their 

team approach youth capacity from the perspective of developing talent within the 

corporate workforce. Their model enables businesses to find and develop talent to 

fuel growth, productivity, efficiency, and innovation while providing young people 

with the skills and knowledge they need to more easily secure employment. 

Simultaneously, Akhtar Badshah and Yvonne Thomas of Microsoft, reflect upon 

the company’s core philanthropic philosophy—providing information and communications 

technology (ICT) training that empowers individuals with highdemand 

skills. 

We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to the authors who invested 

their time, energy, and expertise to produce this special issue, which both embodies 

and inspires a guiding theme of collaboration. And, in that spirit, we ask readers 

to consider how they might apply these lessons and innovations to their own 

work, and share their results with us. Many of these authors will be featured in 

“Apply It” learning events throughout the coming year at 

www.YouthEconomicOpportunities.org. We look forward to your participation. 

Making Cents International 

Making Cents International and Citi Foundation 

This youth-focused double 

issue is the product of a 

shared passion to improve 

livelihoods and economic 

opportunities among the 

world’s 1.8 billion youth. 

Citi Foundation 

6 innovations / Youth and Economic Opportunities


Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune 

How Youth-Led Startups 

Are Redefining Entrepreneurship 

In 2005, armed with two years of college Arabic and a vague employment contract, 

I tumbled out of a taxi and onto the main street of Ramallah, Palestine. The region 

was anything but stable. Six months after my arrival, Hamas won its first elections 

and came to rule the West Bank; roughly 18 months after that, the party was ousted 

in a series of bloody clashes and retreated to Gaza. Meanwhile, the Israeli military 

occupation of both areas continued unchecked, as it had for close to 40 years. 

Against this backdrop, my employer, a U.S.-based aid agency, was focused on 

a unique set of priorities: holding focus groups with young Palestinians to hear 

their views on youth economic opportunity and entrepreneurship, and to ask what 

we (as international interlopers) could do to help boost economic growth in the 

country. While we moved from town to town, chatting with group after group of 

earnest youth, two things happened. First, I got bored by the two-hour meetings. 

Second, I noticed that everyone everywhere had a cell phone and that they were 

using them constantly to send text messages to each other—hardly an earth-shattering 

observation in 2013. However, close to 10 years ago, only half the population 

in my own home country, Canada, owned a cell phone, and at the time most 

people didn’t see it as a vital device. 

As the weeks passed, my frustration with the tried-and-true focus group 

approach mounted. At first I was too timid to speak out (this was, more or less, the 

first real job I’d ever held and I considered myself lucky to have it). Ultimately, 

though, I ended up spending any spare moment I could sketching out text-message 

sequences with some friends. As we started to build a team and a concept, we mustered 

up the courage to leave our day jobs and focus on the idea full time. And 

while some criticized us for “having it too easy” or “having all the luck in the 

world” by being able to work on our own clock without a boss or a 9-to-5 schedule, 

we were simply thankful to have a window of uninterrupted time to try out 

something new. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to come up with a mobile solu- 

Based in Ramallah, Palestine, Jacob Korenblum is CEO and co-founder of Souktel, 

the Middle East’s first mobile job information service. He is a past Reynolds 

Foundation Social Enterprise Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2010 Silicon Valley 

Tech Awards Laureate. 

© 2013 Jacob Korenblum 



Souktel—as our mobile job 

service came to be known—has 

been fortunate to help youth in 

21 countries ... Through a 

process that’s low-cost and easy 

to understand, the service has 

allowed thousands of jobseekers 

with basic cell phones 

to create text-, audio-, or webbased 

“mini-CVs”—with 

information about their skills 

and work experience. 

tion that would help thousands of people find work more easily: linking job seekers 

with local employers via text message. 

Fast-forward seven years, and Souktel—as our mobile job service came to be 

known—has been fortunate to help youth in 21 countries, to be profiled in the 

Wall Street Journal, and to raise venture funding from a group of investors that 

includes household names like Google and Cisco. Through a process that’s lowcost 

and easy to understand, 

the service has allowed thousands 

of job-seekers with 

basic cell phones to create 

text-, audio-, or web-based 

“mini-CVs”—with information 

about their skills and 

work experience. These profiles 

are then auto-matched 

with jobs that are listed by 

employers through a similar 

process, and both sets of users 

get SMS alerts with the other’s 

contact details. Now that 

we’ve reached scale, we frequently 

are asked the same 

question by aspiring startups 

and high-level decisionmakers: 

What’s the secret to building 

a successful youth enterprise 

Naturally there’s no simple 

answer, but I usually respond 

the same way each time I’m asked: from our experience, as a group of Palestinians, 

Canadians, and Americans, we’ve achieved success by taking the very concepts that 

often are used to define youth negatively—especially in the Arab world—and 

inverting them to achieve positive aims. To be specific, we believe that the path to 

successful youth entrepreneurship is defined by three key factors: frustration, fearlessness, 

and fortune—and by “fortune,” I mean luck; the money, if it comes, is seldom 

in the picture at the beginning. 

Young entrepreneurs are frustrated. We’re never content with the status quo 

and are always seeking to combat what we see as inefficiencies in the world around 

us: Why should I call several taxi companies to hail a cab when a single app could 

let me find a car that’s down the street Why walk miles to charge my phone when 

a solar device lets me do it at home In each of these cases (and there are hundreds 

if not thousands of them), “productive frustration” has led to the birth of productive 

youth-led enterprises. Where Souktel is concerned, it was our dissatisfaction 



with traditional ways of solving youth unemployment that led us to become bored, 

frustrated, and eventually innovative. 

However, in much of the Arab and Muslim world, “youth” and “frustration” are 

often uttered in the same breath but with much less positive associations. “Are 

Frustrated, Idle Youth in Somalia a Threat to the World” asks a September 2012 

Reuters headline. “Riots in Stockholm Continue as Youth Vent Frustrations,” read 

a headline in Germany’s Der Spiegel this past May. While policy experts and decisionmakers 

unveil new initiatives aimed at helping youth realize their potential, 

the media—a much more powerful amplifier—conflates young people and their 

frustration with danger and the destruction of property. Of course this isn’t always 

the case and not all media follow this line, but rare is the time I’ve read a headline 

that proclaims, “Youth Channel Frustration to Build New Social Venture.” My 

point here is that I believe we can do a great deal to help young people in Egypt or 

Indonesia to harness their frustrations to positive goals instead of castigating youth 

for being fed up with their surroundings. 

Beyond being frustrated, successful young entrepreneurs are also fearless. We 

don’t take “no” for an answer, and we don’t balk at risk. In my first few weeks in 

Palestine, I slept on the floor of my bedroom, away from the window, as tracer fire 

lit up the valley below our apartment building each night. As a Canadian, this was 

a shocking new reality; for my young Palestinian colleagues, this was daily life— 

and had been for decades. But life in a conflict zone also had taught our team 

members from the region not to sweat the small stuff. If our prototype failed the 

day before an important pitch, they weren’t phased by it. If our servers went down 

for an hour, we all worked quickly to figure out where the problem lay, but without 

getting scared. This may sound like an opportunistic corollary to connect the 

dots between fearlessness under fire (literally) and fearlessness in the face of startup 

market pressures, but I firmly believe that our experience cutting our teeth in 

Palestine during some of the region’s more difficult recent moments (the 2006 

Lebanon war and the 2008 invasion of Gaza, among others) has helped us put our 

startup challenges into perspective and enabled us to forge ahead more boldly with 

our entrepreneurial plans. 

During the 2011 London riots, a Guardian piece entitled “Who Are the 

Rioters” followed a group of young women and men as they torched vehicles and 

vandalized shops. Characterized mainly by their brazenness and lack of trepidation 

in the face of local law enforcement, these youth were every adult’s worst 

nightmare: “She helped set a motorbike alight, walking away with her hands aloft,” 

wrote correspondents Paul Lewis and James Harkin of one girl’s exploits, thus 

painting a vivid picture of daring triumphalism in the midst of utter anarchy. In 

our first-ever “elevator pitch,” at the Harvard Business School’s Business Plan 

Competition, we had literally four minutes to extoll the virtues of our new, as-yetuntested 

technology. We swallowed hard, and walked away with our hands aloft as 

well; not only had we unwittingly harnessed fearlessness and used it to our advantage, 

we’d scored a runner-up finish in the social venture category. There is a world 

of difference between these examples, of course: Harvard is by no means a London 



public housing estate. But I present this contrast, and commonality, deliberately: 

Each year a handful of Palestinians, many from rural villages, journey to Harvard 

and MIT on full scholarships. With the right support in place, this trickle could 

turn into a flood, and young people in Cairo or Tunis could be channeling their 

fearlessness, en masse, from the streets to the executive boardrooms of venture 

capital firms in New York or Silicon Valley. Precedents are already being set in this 

regard. Initiatives like the MasterCard Foundation’s half-billion-dollar Scholars 

Program fund African youth leaders to study at Stanford, Berkeley, and a wide 

range of top schools across Africa and North America. 

Beyond frustration and fearlessness, young entrepreneurs are ultimately 

blessed with good fortune. Of course, a large part of Souktel’s success is due to the 

hard work and tremendous skill of our team. But to a certain extent, we were simply 

lucky. We took a gamble that mobile phones would become the “next big thing” 

in youth financial inclusion when local employers, international donors, and the 

general public still maintained that texting “LOL” was the main purpose of a 

mobile handset. Even armed with reams of market research, we had no way of 

knowing that our innovation would eventually take off and reach scale. As hard as 

we’ve worked to achieve our venture’s growth, we’re also innately aware that factors 

beyond our control helped us get where we are. 

Souktel was once approached by an American venture capital fund that had 

developed a unique algorithm: by drawing on “big data” from the entrepreneurship 

sector and applying computer-generated screening criteria, the formula could 

weed out less promising enterprises and hone in on winning ideas, thus creating a 

foolproof funding portfolio. The fund was interested in our work, we were 

intrigued, and we agreed to move ahead with them in the hope that we might 

squeeze through the magic filter and be deemed a successful youth enterprise. 

Soon after, though, we were told that we didn’t qualify as a potential investee, as 

our funding history didn’t generate enough data points for the software to analyze. 

Nonetheless, at roughly the same time, we wrapped up a lengthy—and, in contrast, 

very traditional—due diligence process with a Middle East-focused fund that 

counted eBay’s Jeff Skoll and Google.org as its backers, and we received $1 million 

in financing. Meanwhile, closer scrutiny of the “algorithm fund’s” portfolio showed 

that, by its cofounder’s own admission in a 2012 article, “it is too early to report 

successes or failures” among the 20-plus startups it had thus far funded through its 

model. 

My point here is that we can all look for best practices in youth entrepreneurship—and 

this is not to say that correlative trends don’t exist—but, from our experience, 

many successful enterprises are successful not because they conform to certain 

criteria, but because to a large extent they’re lucky to sprout in the right place 

at the right time. Would-be entrepreneurs and the funders who support them must 

be aware of this reality; venture capital funds and foundations expend tremendous 

resources trying to define the key traits of an entrepreneur, or the “secret sauce” of 

entrepreneurship, but with limited results. At the same time, youth across the 

developing world are often derided by their elders for having all the privileges of 



society and none of the responsibilities—or for sitting idle and abusing the good 

fortune that has resulted from their parents’ hard work. “Wayward youth” has been 

a North American catchphrase for decades. The challenge for all of us in the youth 

entrepreneurship community—decisionmakers, funders, and plucky startups—is 

to leverage this good fortune when it happens rather than criticising it. We then 

need to move quickly to provide the kind of strategic support that lets innovative 

youth enterprises move from startup to scale. 

Frustration and fearlessness, when strengthened by good fortune, can yield 

incredible results: Otlob in Egypt and Digital Mania Studio in Tunisia are just two 

examples of youth-led ventures that have achieved market success since the Arab 

Spring. And while conflict continues in Palestine 

and nearby Syria—and these harsh realities must 

never be overlooked—I firmly believe that we are 

currently in a period of good fortune in the Arab 

World, at least where youth entrepreneurship is concerned. 

Ten years ago, few would have imagined that 

Nablus in the Northern West Bank, hemmed in by 

Israeli military checkpoints for years, would host an 

offshoot of the global Startup Weekend venture contest, 

sponsored by Microsoft and Amazon (among 

others), where aspiring entrepreneurs would be 

mentored by team members from Souktel and other 

local tech ventures before pitching their ideas to a 

panel of judges. Fewer still would have dreamed that that the Gaza Strip would be 

home to Google-supported app developer meetups. The rapid growth of affordable 

technologies—especially mobile tech—and the power of these technologies to connect 

youth with financial services and entrepreneurship support means that more 

young people than ever before are able to turn entrepreneurial dreams into reality. 

As a global community, we must now become experts at recognizing frustration 

and fearlessness as catalysts for positive change and stand ready to spring into 

action when the right mix of frustration, fearlessness, and fortune presents itself. 

Life as an entrepreneur is never easy; life as a young entrepreneur in the 

Middle East, or any other emerging market, is dramatically more difficult. The 

challenges that constrain youth enterprise—access to education, access to capital, 

and dynamic institutions, among others—will likely persist, even as the technologies 

that help connect youth become cheaper and more widespread. At Souktel, 

we’re constantly working to stay two steps ahead of the curve, to provide value to 

the communities that use our services, and to stand tall as ambassadors and mentors 

for aspiring young businessmen and women across the Arab World. This year 

we’re launching new job services in Iraq and Egypt while growing our team and 

releasing new products—all at the same time. Every day is difficult, but no day is 

ever boring; the realities of being young people living and working in our region 

keep us energized and entrepreneurial. 

Frustration and 

fearlessness, when 

strengthened by 

good fortune, can 

yield incredible 

results. 


innovations 


Special Issue for the 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference 

Guest Edited by Making Cents International 

and the Citi Foundation 

INNOVATIONS IS JOINTLY HOSTED BY 

GEORGE MASON 

UNIVERSITY 

School of Public Policy 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

Kennedy School of 

Government 

Belfer Center for 

Science and International 

Affairs 

MASSACHUSETTS 

INSTITUTE OF 

TECHNOLOGY 

Legatum Center for 

Development and 

Entrepreneurship 

School of Public Policy 

mitpressjournals.org/innovations 

editors@innovationsjournal.net

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