Proyectá tu futuro – Buenos Aires Youth Employment Social Impact Bond

When the feasibility study for this SIB project was conducted, Argentina had the highest youth unemployment rate of all Latin American countries, reaching 24.7% in 2017. Youth unemployment is particularly high in the South of Buenos Aires, where the population lives in a more vulnerable context; youth there are 70% more likely to be unemployed than their peers in the rest of Buenos Aires.

Source: Acrux Partners (2018).

This social impact bond was developed to deliver skills training and employment support to vulnerable, unemployed individuals aged 17-24 living in the South of Buenos Aires. 

The program, “Proyectá tu futuro”,  works with 1,000 young people who live in the five most deprived boroughs in the South of the city. It is delivered by a collaboration of four different service providers over a period of 4 to 6 months (with around 8 hours of support per week), depending on the service provider. It provides a mix of soft and technical/practical skills training, as well as mentoring for at least 6 months after the training component is completed, to help participants to find and sustain a job. Achieving outcomes also requires providers to work with employers to increase the number of companies that are open to hiring individuals from this societal group and foster employment.

To be eligible, individuals or their immediate family (mother, father, child), must be in receipt of a means-tested government subsidy, or be residents of a settlement or shanty town in the selected boroughs. They cannot have participated in another employment or skills-development government program in the 3 months prior to entering this program.

The evaluation, and measurement of outcomes achieved for the first cohort, will start in June 2019. The last results achieved by the program will only be known in December 2021, 12 months after the end of the intervention for the last cohort. The cohorts were administratively defined in the beginning of the project.