YOU Program

The Youth Online and Upward (YOU) Program has begun to fund the provision of training for Kosovo youth as well as their access to job opportunities. The activities will primarily target unemployed or underemployed young men and women to increase their ability to compete in relevant job segments. The program will enable beneficiaries to perform IT or IT-enabled services. Beneficiaries are expected to gain more employment in the local ICT market as a result of these trainings.

The YOU Program will skill beneficiaries over a period of six months to work online while performing IT and IT‐enabled services in front‐end web development, graphic design, and social media marketing/search engine optimization (SEO) as online freelancers. In doing so, the Program will replicate the approach deemed to be the most effective in terms of skills and digital jobs acquisition, tested in a four‐phased WoW pilot, designed and implemented by the WB in 2015‐2017 in five municipalities, and later replicated by two other donors through similar short‐term interventions.

In the training, a pre‐determined share of spots (50%) will be reserved for young women, as the KODE looks at the youth unemployment problem in Kosovo from the gender lens.

The YOU will be oriented to enroll the youth( to approximately 2,000), with a pre‐determined share of spots for qualified young women, with the defined characteristics, such as:

a) aged 16 years old at the moment of application;
b) who is currently unemployed or underemployed, and who would like to find employment;
c) who has at least a basic level of English