Bangladesh
Youth Employment through Skills · Bangladesh
They had never turned on
They had never turned on
a computer. Then they
went global.
Korail is Dhaka’s largest slum: more than 170,000 people, and almost no route out of day labour. Between 2015 and 2017, UNDP and Learnio ran a training programme there for young people with no computer literacy, no English for clients, and often no electricity at home. 350 graduated. Two thirds were earning on international freelancing platforms within three months.
Graduated
350 trainees
Earning within 3 months
67%
In partnership with
With Korail CDC, JAAGO Foundation, Swanirvar Bangladesh and the Government of Bangladesh
With Korail CDC, JAAGO Foundation, Swanirvar Bangladesh and the Government of Bangladesh
18M+
Young Bangladeshis not in employment, education or training
170,000+
Residents of Korail, the largest slum in Dhaka city
350
Young people trained and graduated across three cohorts
67%
Secured their first paid online job within three months
Bangladesh has one of the youngest populations on earth. More than 18 million young Bangladeshis are not in employment, education or training, and of those who do hold a job, four out of five are underemployed. The country was never short of people. It was short of routes into work that actually paid.
Korail sits on the shore of Gulshan Lake, in the middle of Dhaka, with the wealthiest district in the country visible across the water. More than 170,000 people live there. Its young residents faced the obstacles you would expect: no reliable electricity, no computer at home, no money for a course, no English to speak with a client. They also faced one you might not. A day labouring wage paid today. A six-month training programme promised something uncertain, later. Choosing the wage was not irrational.
In 2015, UNDP’s Innovation Facility bet on a different mechanism. Rather than train young people for a local labour market with no jobs to give them, it would train them for the international online labour market, where the client sits in another country and nobody asks which neighbourhood you come from. UNDP brought in the Korail Community Development Committee, the JAAGO Foundation, and Learnio, then operating as CodersTrust, to deliver the training.
The pilot was designed as an experiment. UNDP’s own year-in-review recorded that it “successfully met and surpassed targets” on typing speed and computer application use for the students. UNDP Innovation Facility · 2015 Year in Review · ICT Opportunities for Slums
Voices from Korail
Behind every number,
Behind every number,
a life that changed.
The reporting counted placements and earnings. The graduates measured it differently: the first computer they ever switched on, the first client who paid, the first month their income came from somewhere other than day labour.
Bangladesh
“Just one year ago I did not know how to turn on a computer.”
A year into the programme he was earning up to $200 a month, and expected to earn more the month after. Thirty-nine other graduates in his cohort were starting to win jobs at the same time. He speaks in the programme film above.
Graduate, first cohort
Name to be confirmed
“Quote to be pulled from Shamim’s film.”
Shamim Ahmed trained through the programme and now works as a freelancer from Korail, earning enough to support his family. His story is told in full in the film in this section.
Shamim Ahmed
Graduate · Freelancer, Korail
“Many young people don’t know how to chase their dream, because there is no opportunity.”
UNDP’s stake in the programme was never only the training. It was the demonstration that a slum address is not a disqualification from the global labour market, and that the mechanism could be handed to anyone willing to run it.
UNDP representative
Name to be confirmed · Programme film
A look back
We didn’t pick the easiest place to start.
We didn’t pick the easiest place to start.
We picked the hardest.
350 graduates · Korail, Dhaka · 2015 to 2017
Project · Youth Employment through Skills (YES)
How it worked
Remove every excuse.
Then teach them to bid.
A curriculum was never going to be enough for students with no electricity at home and no reason to trust that six months of training would pay. So the programme ran awareness campaigns inside Korail, held courtyard meetings and counselling sessions with parents, built a fully equipped lab where students could practise and work, raised funds and facilitated bank loans so that cost was never the reason anyone dropped out, added a basic English communication module so graduates could talk to clients, and gave every student one-to-one mentorship instead of leaving them to find work alone.
2015
Pilot
UNDP’s Innovation Facility funds a test. Forty students from Korail are taught basic English and computer skills over six months, then helped onto freelance marketplaces. Delivered with the Korail Community Development Committee and the JAAGO Foundation.
40
Students in the first cohort
2015–16
Mobilisation
Awareness campaigns inside Korail, courtyard meetings, parent counselling sessions. A fully equipped lab is built. Funds are raised and bank loans facilitated, so that money is never the reason a student walks away.
$40K
Target raised to launch the scale-up
2016
YES
The Youth Employment through Skills programme proper. Three hundred students, none with any prior computer skills, train free of charge in Web Research and Support. Within four months they are working on the freelancing marketplaces.
300
Students trained free of charge
2017
Up the value chain
A third cohort, delivered with the Government of Bangladesh and Swanirvar Bangladesh, moves fifty underprivileged students out of research and support work and into graphic design and web design, where the hourly rates are higher.
50
Students on the design track
The ambition
A national pipeline
YES was designed as the first step of a national programme intended to activate 100,000 young Bangladeshis as IT freelancers, part-funded by graduates directing a share of their own earnings back towards sponsoring the next cohort.
100K
Students the model was built to reach
Outcomes
Fast employability,
Fast employability,
from the steepest possible start.
The point of YES was never headcount. It was whether young people with no computer literacy at all could reach paying clients on the open international market, and how quickly they could do it.
Headline metric
67%
Of graduates secured their first paid online job within three months of finishing.
Starting point
Never used a computer
Average earnings
$100/mo and rising
Time to first job
3 months
350
Trainees graduated
Across three cohorts between 2015 and 2017, drawn from Korail and the surrounding area.
20.85%
Placed during the course itself
Students who won their first paid contract before the training had even finished.
56%
In full-time work
Graduates employed full time through national and international marketplaces, rather than piecing together occasional contracts.
What happened next.
Follow-up on the cohorts runs well past the training window, and straight into the pandemic. Freelancing turned out to be unusually resilient. When Dhaka’s day-labour economy shut down under lockdown and social distancing measures, graduates whose clients sat in other countries kept working, and household incomes held.
40
Students in the 2015 pilot, whose results unlocked the full programme.
6 mo
From no computer literacy at all to bidding for international contracts.
342
Job placements recorded across the programme, on the organisation’s own reporting.
$200
Highest monthly earnings reported by a pilot graduate inside his first year.
Verified & documented
Read the public record.
The pilot is documented by UNDP itself, in the Innovation Facility’s 2015 Year in Review, filed under ICT Opportunities for Slums. The programme film and the graduate films carry the rest of the record in the participants’ own words.
Report · 2015 Year in Review
UNDP Innovation Facility: ICT Opportunities for Slums
Read the report →
Film · Programme overview
Youth Employment through Skills: the case for the pilot
Watch the film →
Film · Graduate story
Shamim Ahmed: a freelancing career, built from Korail slum
Watch the film →
Film · CodersTrust + UNDP
Youth Employment through Skills: inside the training
Watch the film →
Case study · CodersTrust
UNDP YES Project: from Bangladesh’s largest slum to the biggest global freelancing marketplaces
Read the case study →
Note: Learnio operated as CodersTrust throughout the YES programme, and UNDP’s
documentation references the organisation under that name. The company, mission and core team are continuous.