About the Jobs Group

About The Jobs Group

The Jobs Group is a cross-cutting unit at the World Bank Group (WBG), governed by a Bank-wide Steering Committee and hosted in the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. The Group identifies best practices and seeks solutions to create better jobs and improve labor market outcomes and opportunities, especially for low-income households and excluded groups.

We work with our WBG colleagues across different Global Practices and the IFC, generating, testing, and sharing best practices, including through our blogs. We develop resources and tools for practitioners to use and we host training events.

Context Strategy Partners

Where Do We Work?

The Jobs Group currently works in over 40 countries, spread across six regions, supporting jobs diagnostics and strategies, sectoral pilots and evaluations, and lending operations. Of these, half are among the world’s 75 poorest countries, supported by the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA).

Countries

World Bank projects with active jobs-themed projects

556

Total World Bank investments in jobs-themed projects

Billion

Percentage of World Bank projects that include a jobs theme

Beneficiaries of job-focused interventions

Million

March 2023

Jobs Diagnostics and Strategies

We help countries identify jobs challenges by analyzing their macroeconomy, labor market, and private sector growth, compared with international benchmarks. Jobs Diagnostics (JDs) highlight the market and policy failures that hamper private investment and job creation and propose ways to correct them. Our JD findings are integrated into our Strategic Country Diagnostics (SCDs) and Country Economic Memoranda (CEM), which inform our Country Partnerships Frameworks (CPFs). JDs draw on the Jobs Indicators (JOIN) database, a global statistical resource curated by the Jobs Group. JOIN data are also widely used in other Bank reports, briefings, and blogs. In 2019 we made JOIN available to users outside the Bank; launched a course with hands-on training on JD tools and techniques for developing country governments and other donor agencies; and created a Jobs Diagnostics and Solutions Practitioners Network.

Operationalizing support for jobs transformations

The World Bank Group finances investment operations which are relevant to improving jobs outcomes. We do this through IDA and IBRD policy lending, lending for results and investment lending, and IFC investment operations. In 2019, our jobs-related projects reached almost 10 million beneficiaries, including 6.5 million in IDA countries and 3 million female beneficiaries.

Key points of entry include: macroeconomic and regulatory reform; finance sector development and infrastructure programs which enable better opportunities for private investment; support to agricultural value chains that link farmers to markets on more favorable terms; targeted programs to support private sector development (e.g. Special Economic Zones and SME development programs); spatial development programs that create spaces for better jobs and help workers access them (e.g. secondary city development); environment programs (e.g. the promotion of “green jobs” ); and human capital programs (education, training, active labor market policies, and social protection).

Jobs and Economic Transformation

Mobilizing Development Lending to Create More and Better Jobs Blog Series

To support the integration of jobs into development lending, the Jobs Umbrella Multi-Donor Trust Fund (Jobs MDTF) launched in 2019 the Supporting Effective Jobs Lending at Scale (SEJLS) program. SEJLS builds on large scale WBG lending operations improving the consistency of jobs-relevant components and estimation of jobs outcomes.

This blog series shares insights from activities across Jobs MDTF in support of maximizing the jobs impacts of development interventions.

Jobs Lending Blog Series

Knowledge and Research for Solutions

As well as supporting the implementation of established good practices, we also mobilize global knowledge and support cutting-edge research on jobs challenges such as:

How to promote private investment and firms’ growth (especially in labor-intensive sectors);
How to link independent producers to product and financial markets so they can raise their productivity and earnings;
How to reform social protection systems to cover informal workers and reduce barriers to the growth of formal jobs;
How to support well-managed domestic and international labor mobility toward places with higher jobs potential; and,
How to help disadvantaged groups to get the skills and jobs they need, through improved training systems and active labor market policies.

Knowledge and Research

Partners

Jobs Umbrella MDTF

Financial instrument that supports the World Bank Group’s jobs strategy to contribute to poverty reduction and inclusive growth.

Solutions for Youth Employment

A coalition focused on improving job outcomes for young people.