Events
Youth Skills Reimagined: Investing in Agency, Adaptability, and Employability
We brought together leading voices from across the education finance ecosystem to explore: How can youth skills systems be strengthened to better equip young people with the socio-emotional (#SEL), collaboration, community-based, and advocacy skills needed to navigate rapidly changing labor markets?
Youth Skills Reimagined: Investing in Agency, Adaptability, and Employability
📅 Thursday, June 25
🕒 8am EDT / 2pm CEST
💻 Panel and interactive Q&A
Key takeaways emerged from the discussion:
- Holistic skills and genuine youth partnership produce stronger outcomes: Young people develop confidence, empathy, and adaptability through real challenges and lived experience, not through separate workshops. This works best when youth are brought in early, given real content to engage with, and connected directly to decision-makers rather than consulted at the end of a process. Treating technical and social-emotional skills as inseparable, and young people as genuine partners, produces stronger and more lasting results.
- Shared language and better measurement are key to financing holistic skills at scale: The field uses a range of terms — SEL, durable skills, life skills — that often describe overlapping ideas. Greater alignment on language supports shared metrics, which in turn strengthens the financing case for holistic skills programs. Approaches like social KPIs in sustainability-linked financing show what is already possible.
- Scaling holistic skills development requires systems-level change: Students, educators, employers, and funders are often working toward similar goals but responding to different incentives. As long as admissions criteria, funding conditions, and success metrics remain narrow, young people and institutions will prioritize accordingly. Shifting those incentives, across curricula, financing models, and how we define and measure success, is what drives lasting change.
Speakers:
- Carina Fichard de Miranda, Global Sector Lead for IFC Education, International Finance Corporation (IFC)
- Dilan Bocanegra Avellaneda, Project Youth Board Leader, Coschool
- Giulia McPherson, Executive Director, GCE-US
- Lara Almeida, Student Representative, GCE-US
- Ross Hall, Education Portfolio Lead, Fondation Botnar
- Kusi Hornberger, Moderator, Program Director, EFN
Thank you to everyone who joined our conversation on investing in youth skills for a changing world!
To explore more, read our latest blog on why youth employment approaches are evolving beyond technical training alone, and how results-based financing can help strengthen agency, adaptability, and long-term employability.
Stay tuned for more webinars!
