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

Youth and Economic OpportunitiesProduced in partnership with Making Cents International and the Citi Foundation

Lead Essays

Arnest Sebbumba Finding the Word for Entrepreneur in LugandaJudith Rodin & Eme Essien Lore Rethinking Youth OpportunityÁngel Cabrera & Callie Le Renard “Go to college...!”Stan Litow Innovating to Strengthen Youth EmploymentCarl Schramm University Entrepreneurship May Be Failing

Case NarrativeJacob Korenblum Frustration, Fearlessness, and FortuneMartin Burt The “Poverty Stoplight” Approach Kevin McKague et al. Reducing Poverty by Employing Young WomenNell Merlino Cracking the Glass Ceiling and Raising the Roof Shai Reshef Going Against the Flow in Higher EducationFiona Macaulay A World of Opportunity

Analysis and Perspectives on PolicyNicholas Davis et al. | Trina Williams Shanks et al. | Ann CottonMichael Chertok & Jeremy Hockenstein | Akhtar Badshah & Yvonne Thomas Jamie M. Zimmerman & Julia Arnold | John OwensBeverly Schwartz & Deepali Khanna | James Sumberg & Christine Okali

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL CHALLENGES

TECHNOLOGY | GOVERNANCE | GLOBALIZATION

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Introductory Essays5 Guest Editor’s Introduction

Making Cents International and Citi Foundation

7 Investing in the Economic Progress of YouthJasmine Thomas

Lead Essays

13 Finding the Word for Entrepreneur in LugandaArnest Sebbumba

19 Youth Opportunity: Rethinking the Next GenerationJudith 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 EmploymentStanley Litow

43 University Entrepreneurship May Be Failing Its Market TestCarl Schramm

Case Narratives

49 Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune: How Youth-Led Startups Are Redefining EntrepreneurshipJacob Korenblum

Fundación Paraguaya55 The “Poverty Stoplight” Approach to Eliminating

Multidimensional Poverty: Business, Civil Society, and Government Working Together in ParaguayMartin Burt

innovationsTECHNOLOGY | GOVERNANCE | GLOBALIZATION

Special Issue for the 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference

Hathay Bunano77 Reducing Poverty by Employing Young Women: Hathay

Bunano’s Scalable Model for Rural Production in BangladeshKevin McKague, Samantha Morshed, and Habibur Rahman

Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence97 Cracking the Glass Ceiling and Raising the Roof

Nell Merlino

University of the People109 Going Against the Flow in Higher Education:

Deliberately Including those Previously ExcludedShai Reshef

Making Cents International125 Toward a World of Opportunity

Fiona Macaulay

Analysis149 TEN Youth: Unlocking Enterprise Growth by Focusing on

the Fortune at the Bottom of the Talent PyramidNicholas Davis, Ebba Hansmeyer, Branka Minic, Shantanu Prakash, and Subramanian Rangan

167 Financial Education and Financial Access: Lessons Learned from Child Development Account ResearchTrina R. Williams Shanks, Lewis Mandell, and Deborah Adams

Perspectives on Policy185 Sourcing Change: Digital Work Building Bridges

to Professional LifeMichael Chertok and Jeremy Hockenstein

197 YouthSpark and the Evolution of a Corporate Philanthropy ProgramAkhtar Badshah and Yvonne Thomas

211 It’s All About the JobsJamie 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 MoneyInnovations for Youth Financial ServicesJamie M. Zimmerman and Julia Arnold

255 Future Forward: Innovations for Youth Employment in AfricaBeverly Schwartz and Deepali Khanna

267 Young People, Agriculture, and Transformation in Rural Africa: An “Opportunity Space” ApproachJames Sumberg and Christine Okali

279 Offering Digital Financial Services to Promote Financial Inclusion: Lessons We’ve LearnedJohn Owens

About InnovationsInnovations is about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.The journal features cases authored by exceptional innovators; commentary andresearch from leading academics; and essays from globally recognized executives andpolitical leaders. The journal is jointly hosted at George Mason University's School ofPublic Policy, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and MIT's Legatum Centerfor Development and Entrepreneurship. Topics of interest include entrepreneurshipand global development, the revolution in mobile communications, global publichealth, water and sanitation, and energy and climate.Authors published in Innovations to date include three former and one current head ofstate (including U.S. Presidents Carter and Clinton); a Nobel Laureate in Economics;founders and executive directors of some of the world’s leading companies, venturecapital firms, and foundations; and MacArthur Fellows, Skoll awardees, and AshokaFellows. Recently the journal has published special editions in collaboration with theClinton Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation,Ashoka, the Lemelson Foundation, and Social Capital Markets.

Subscribe athttp://www.mitpressjournals.org/innovations

This youth-focused double issue is the product of a shared passion to improvelivelihoods and economic opportunities among the world’s 1.8 billion youth. Thepublication is particularly timely given the increased focus being given to pro-gramming, funding, and research on the contributions of young people in a timeof economic volatility. As the economy shows signs of recovery, the InternationalLabor Organization reports that the global rate of youth unemployment hoversaround 13%, just below the jobless rate at the peak of the crisis—this still repre-sents an estimated 73 million young people. Despite staggering unemployment,our concern is not the scale of the problem. Instead, we are encouraged by the scaleof the opportunity before us.

With the support and collaboration of the Citi Foundation, Making CentsInternational will leverage this Innovations issue as well as the annual conference,funder meetings, “Apply It!” webinars, blogs, crowd-sourced solution events, andother tools to engage a global network of partners to galvanize dialog, collabora-tion, and knowledge-building toward a collective global agenda for youth.Through its Collaborative Learning and Action Institute (Co-Lab), Making Centswill 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 peoplelearn. Co-Lab gives our stakeholders and partners a new platform to both addvalue and benefit from knowledge management that translates ideas into solutions.

The following collection of analyses, research, and remarkable stories is a partof our new vision. In searching for authors, we weren’t searching for all theanswers. We looked across diverse sectors for authors who could connect disparateconcepts, innovations, theories, stories, or research results that move the youtheconomic opportunities agenda forward.

To highlight a few authors, first and foremost, we hear the voices of young peo-ple describing the hard work, ambition, fortitude, and support needed from othersto bring innovations to old problems. Arnest Sebbumba, a young farmer, takes usinto rural Africa and reveals the choices, challenges and opportunities facing agri-cultural entrepreneurs in Uganda. Social entrepreneur and Founder of Souktel,Jacob Korenblum, shares the thrills and spills of navigating entrepreneurship andidentifying new opportunities in conflict-environments.

© 2013 Making Cents International and Citi Foundationinnovations / 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference 5

Making Cents International andCiti Foundation

Introduction to the Special Issue

6 innovations / Youth and Economic Opportunities

Featuring best practices and innovations in youth employment, JamieMcAuliffe’s case study of Employment for Education demonstrates how the NGOcreated a youth jobs model that reverses conventional supply-driven educationprocesses that often widens unemployment. Meanwhile, Michael Chertok andJeremy Hockenstein, of Digital Divide Data, highlight a growing $300 billion busi-ness process outsourcing industry, and the economic potential of Impact Sourcing

as a “game-changer” for scalingskilled jobs among youth.

Innovations aimed at increasingfinancial education, access, and inclu-sion among young people is critical.Research from Jamie Zimmermanand Julia Arnold of the New AmericaFoundation chronicles various mod-els that incorporate mobile technolo-gy into youth financial services pro-grams, illustrating both the promiseand, notably, high-cost and regulato-ry barriers to implementation.

Underscoring the critical role ofthe private sector, Branka Minic, Nicholas Davis, and Ebba Hansmeyer and theirteam approach youth capacity from the perspective of developing talent within thecorporate workforce. Their model enables businesses to find and develop talent tofuel growth, productivity, efficiency, and innovation while providing young peoplewith the skills and knowledge they need to more easily secure employment.Simultaneously, Akhtar Badshah and Yvonne Thomas of Microsoft, reflect uponthe company’s core philanthropic philosophy—providing information and com-munications technology (ICT) training that empowers individuals with high-demand skills.

We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to the authors who investedtheir time, energy, and expertise to produce this special issue, which both embod-ies and inspires a guiding theme of collaboration. And, in that spirit, we ask read-ers to consider how they might apply these lessons and innovations to their ownwork, and share their results with us. Many of these authors will be featured in“Apply It” learning events throughout the coming year atwww.YouthEconomicOpportunities.org. We look forward to your participation.

Making Cents International Citi Foundation

Making Cents International and Citi Foundation

This youth-focused doubleissue is the product of ashared passion to improvelivelihoods and economicopportunities among theworld’s 1.8 billion youth.

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 regionwas anything but stable. Six months after my arrival, Hamas won its first electionsand came to rule the West Bank; roughly 18 months after that, the party was oust-ed in a series of bloody clashes and retreated to Gaza. Meanwhile, the Israeli mili-tary 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 ona unique set of priorities: holding focus groups with young Palestinians to heartheir views on youth economic opportunity and entrepreneurship, and to ask whatwe (as international interlopers) could do to help boost economic growth in thecountry. While we moved from town to town, chatting with group after group ofearnest 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 wereusing them constantly to send text messages to each other—hardly an earth-shat-tering observation in 2013. However, close to 10 years ago, only half the popula-tion in my own home country, Canada, owned a cell phone, and at the time mostpeople didn’t see it as a vital device.

As the weeks passed, my frustration with the tried-and-true focus groupapproach mounted. At first I was too timid to speak out (this was, more or less, thefirst 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-messagesequences with some friends. As we started to build a team and a concept, we mus-tered up the courage to leave our day jobs and focus on the idea full time. Andwhile some criticized us for “having it too easy” or “having all the luck in theworld” by being able to work on our own clock without a boss or a 9-to-5 sched-ule, we were simply thankful to have a window of uninterrupted time to try outsomething new. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to come up with a mobile solu-

© 2013 Jacob Korenbluminnovations / 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference 49

Jacob Korenblum

Frustration, Fearlessness, and FortuneHow Youth-Led Startups Are Redefining Entrepreneurship

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 ReynoldsFoundation Social Enterprise Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2010 Silicon ValleyTech Awards Laureate.

50 innovations / Youth and Economic Opportunities

tion that would help thousands of people find work more easily: linking job seek-ers with local employers via text message.

Fast-forward seven years, and Souktel—as our mobile job service came to beknown—has been fortunate to help youth in 21 countries, to be profiled in theWall Street Journal, and to raise venture funding from a group of investors thatincludes household names like Google and Cisco. Through a process that’s low-

cost and easy to understand,the service has allowed thou-sands of job-seekers withbasic cell phones to createtext-, audio-, or web-based“mini-CVs”—with informa-tion about their skills andwork experience. These pro-files are then auto-matchedwith jobs that are listed byemployers through a similarprocess, and both sets of usersget SMS alerts with the other’scontact details. Now thatwe’ve reached scale, we fre-quently are asked the samequestion by aspiring startupsand high-level decisionmak-ers: What’s the secret to build-ing a successful youth enter-prise?

Naturally there’s no simpleanswer, 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 thatoften are used to define youth negatively—especially in the Arab world—andinverting them to achieve positive aims. To be specific, we believe that the path tosuccessful youth entrepreneurship is defined by three key factors: frustration, fear-lessness, and fortune—and by “fortune,” I mean luck; the money, if it comes, is sel-dom in the picture at the beginning.

Young entrepreneurs are frustrated. We’re never content with the status quoand are always seeking to combat what we see as inefficiencies in the world aroundus: Why should I call several taxi companies to hail a cab when a single app couldlet me find a car that’s down the street? Why walk miles to charge my phone whena solar device lets me do it at home? In each of these cases (and there are hundredsif not thousands of them), “productive frustration” has led to the birth of produc-tive youth-led enterprises. Where Souktel is concerned, it was our dissatisfaction

Jacob Korenblum

Souktel—as our mobile jobservice came to be known—hasbeen fortunate to help youth in21 countries ... Through aprocess that’s low-cost and easyto understand, the service hasallowed thousands of job-seekers with basic cell phonesto create text-, audio-, or web-based “mini-CVs”—withinformation about their skillsand work experience.

Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune

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” areoften uttered in the same breath but with much less positive associations. “AreFrustrated, Idle Youth in Somalia a Threat to the World?” asks a September 2012Reuters headline. “Riots in Stockholm Continue as Youth Vent Frustrations,” reada headline in Germany’s Der Spiegel this past May. While policy experts and deci-sionmakers unveil new initiatives aimed at helping youth realize their potential,the media—a much more powerful amplifier—conflates young people and theirfrustration with danger and the destruction of property. Of course this isn’t alwaysthe case and not all media follow this line, but rare is the time I’ve read a headlinethat proclaims, “Youth Channel Frustration to Build New Social Venture.” Mypoint here is that I believe we can do a great deal to help young people in Egypt orIndonesia to harness their frustrations to positive goals instead of castigating youthfor being fed up with their surroundings.

Beyond being frustrated, successful young entrepreneurs are also fearless. Wedon’t take “no” for an answer, and we don’t balk at risk. In my first few weeks inPalestine, I slept on the floor of my bedroom, away from the window, as tracer firelit up the valley below our apartment building each night. As a Canadian, this wasa 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 teammembers from the region not to sweat the small stuff. If our prototype failed theday before an important pitch, they weren’t phased by it. If our servers went downfor an hour, we all worked quickly to figure out where the problem lay, but with-out getting scared. This may sound like an opportunistic corollary to connect thedots between fearlessness under fire (literally) and fearlessness in the face of start-up market pressures, but I firmly believe that our experience cutting our teeth inPalestine during some of the region’s more difficult recent moments (the 2006Lebanon war and the 2008 invasion of Gaza, among others) has helped us put ourstartup challenges into perspective and enabled us to forge ahead more boldly withour entrepreneurial plans.

During the 2011 London riots, a Guardian piece entitled “Who Are theRioters?” followed a group of young women and men as they torched vehicles andvandalized shops. Characterized mainly by their brazenness and lack of trepida-tion in the face of local law enforcement, these youth were every adult’s worstnightmare: “She helped set a motorbike alight, walking away with her hands aloft,”wrote correspondents Paul Lewis and James Harkin of one girl’s exploits, thuspainting a vivid picture of daring triumphalism in the midst of utter anarchy. Inour first-ever “elevator pitch,” at the Harvard Business School’s Business PlanCompetition, we had literally four minutes to extoll the virtues of our new, as-yet-untested technology. We swallowed hard, and walked away with our hands aloft aswell; not only had we unwittingly harnessed fearlessness and used it to our advan-tage, we’d scored a runner-up finish in the social venture category. There is a worldof difference between these examples, of course: Harvard is by no means a London

innovations / 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference 51

52 innovations / Youth and Economic Opportunities

public housing estate. But I present this contrast, and commonality, deliberately:Each year a handful of Palestinians, many from rural villages, journey to Harvardand MIT on full scholarships. With the right support in place, this trickle couldturn into a flood, and young people in Cairo or Tunis could be channeling theirfearlessness, en masse, from the streets to the executive boardrooms of venturecapital firms in New York or Silicon Valley. Precedents are already being set in thisregard. Initiatives like the MasterCard Foundation’s half-billion-dollar ScholarsProgram fund African youth leaders to study at Stanford, Berkeley, and a widerange of top schools across Africa and North America.

Beyond frustration and fearlessness, young entrepreneurs are ultimatelyblessed with good fortune. Of course, a large part of Souktel’s success is due to thehard work and tremendous skill of our team. But to a certain extent, we were sim-ply lucky. We took a gamble that mobile phones would become the “next big thing”in youth financial inclusion when local employers, international donors, and thegeneral public still maintained that texting “LOL” was the main purpose of amobile handset. Even armed with reams of market research, we had no way ofknowing that our innovation would eventually take off and reach scale. As hard aswe’ve worked to achieve our venture’s growth, we’re also innately aware that factorsbeyond our control helped us get where we are.

Souktel was once approached by an American venture capital fund that haddeveloped a unique algorithm: by drawing on “big data” from the entrepreneurshipsector and applying computer-generated screening criteria, the formula couldweed out less promising enterprises and hone in on winning ideas, thus creating afoolproof funding portfolio. The fund was interested in our work, we wereintrigued, and we agreed to move ahead with them in the hope that we mightsqueeze 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, asour 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 thatcounted eBay’s Jeff Skoll and Google.org as its backers, and we received $1 millionin financing. Meanwhile, closer scrutiny of the “algorithm fund’s” portfolio showedthat, by its cofounder’s own admission in a 2012 article, “it is too early to reportsuccesses or failures” among the 20-plus startups it had thus far funded through itsmodel.

My point here is that we can all look for best practices in youth entrepreneur-ship—and this is not to say that correlative trends don’t exist—but, from our expe-rience, many successful enterprises are successful not because they conform to cer-tain criteria, but because to a large extent they’re lucky to sprout in the right placeat the right time. Would-be entrepreneurs and the funders who support them mustbe aware of this reality; venture capital funds and foundations expend tremendousresources trying to define the key traits of an entrepreneur, or the “secret sauce” ofentrepreneurship, but with limited results. At the same time, youth across thedeveloping world are often derided by their elders for having all the privileges of

Jacob Korenblum

Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune

society and none of the responsibilities—or for sitting idle and abusing the goodfortune that has resulted from their parents’ hard work. “Wayward youth” has beena North American catchphrase for decades. The challenge for all of us in the youthentrepreneurship community—decisionmakers, funders, and plucky startups—isto leverage this good fortune when it happens rather than criticising it. We thenneed to move quickly to provide the kind of strategic support that lets innovativeyouth enterprises move from startup to scale.

Frustration and fearlessness, when strengthened by good fortune, can yieldincredible results: Otlob in Egypt and Digital Mania Studio in Tunisia are just twoexamples of youth-led ventures that have achieved market success since the ArabSpring. And while conflict continues in Palestineand nearby Syria—and these harsh realities mustnever be overlooked—I firmly believe that we arecurrently in a period of good fortune in the ArabWorld, at least where youth entrepreneurship is con-cerned. Ten years ago, few would have imagined thatNablus in the Northern West Bank, hemmed in byIsraeli military checkpoints for years, would host anoffshoot of the global Startup Weekend venture con-test, sponsored by Microsoft and Amazon (amongothers), where aspiring entrepreneurs would bementored by team members from Souktel and otherlocal tech ventures before pitching their ideas to apanel of judges. Fewer still would have dreamed that that the Gaza Strip would behome to Google-supported app developer meetups. The rapid growth of affordabletechnologies—especially mobile tech—and the power of these technologies to con-nect youth with financial services and entrepreneurship support means that moreyoung people than ever before are able to turn entrepreneurial dreams into reality.As a global community, we must now become experts at recognizing frustrationand fearlessness as catalysts for positive change and stand ready to spring intoaction when the right mix of frustration, fearlessness, and fortune presents itself.

Life as an entrepreneur is never easy; life as a young entrepreneur in theMiddle East, or any other emerging market, is dramatically more difficult. Thechallenges that constrain youth enterprise—access to education, access to capital,and dynamic institutions, among others—will likely persist, even as the technolo-gies 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 tothe communities that use our services, and to stand tall as ambassadors and men-tors for aspiring young businessmen and women across the Arab World. This yearwe’re launching new job services in Iraq and Egypt while growing our team andreleasing new products—all at the same time. Every day is difficult, but no day isever boring; the realities of being young people living and working in our regionkeep us energized and entrepreneurial.

innovations / 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference 53

Frustration andfearlessness, when

strengthened bygood fortune, can

yield incredibleresults.

innovationsTECHNOLOGY | GOVERNANCE | GLOBALIZATION

GEORGE MASONUNIVERSITY

School of Public Policy

HARVARD UNIVERSITYKennedy School of

GovernmentBelfer Center for

Science and InternationalAffairs

MASSACHUSETTSINSTITUTE OFTECHNOLOGY

Legatum Center forDevelopment andEntrepreneurship

INNOVATIONS IS JOINTLY HOSTED BY

Special Issue for the 2013 Global Youth Economic Opportunities ConferenceGuest Edited by Making Cents International

and the Citi Foundation

School of Public Policy

mitpressjournals.org/innovationseditors@innovationsjournal.net

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