The Meet Your Future Project (MYF) is an RCT designed in partnership with BRAC Uganda to investigate the relative importance of several barriers to quality employment that students face when transitioning from the educational sector into labor markets characterized by high levels of informality. The main study is aimed at understanding whether career-services are specifically beneficial for disadvantaged populations, including: (i) economically disadvantaged students sponsored by NGOs, (ii) women and (iii) minorities, such as under-represented ethnic groups and migrants. The experimental setting is that of Vocational Training Institutes (VTIs) in Uganda.
Over 2020 the research team has adapted the MYF Project to the new conditions imposed by the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic. With a survey in the field when the outbreak came to light and the intervention originally planned to roll out over summer 2020, funding from the G2LM|LIC initiative allowed the research team to conduct additional phone surveys with all the respondents as well as the institutional partners involved to monitor the evolving situation and pick the best adaptation strategy.
By building on the rich set of data collected right before the outbreak the research team built two unique panels to assess the crisis’ impacts on (813) students’ and (631) alumni’s livelihood, time use, labor market expectations/outcomes, intentions to dropout for current students, mental health and much more.
The phone survey with students enrolled in the VTIs across central and eastern Uganda. The student survey was conducted in June 2020, three months into the Ugandan school closure, to contribute evidence toward understanding how the pandemic affected students’ learning environments, mental health and time use in the very short run. 60% of the students in the sample are male, and the average student is 20 years old. The alumni survey was conducted between end of June until mid of July and asked those who graduated from a National Certificate course from one of the five VTIs the MYF program has been implemented.
The data collected will serve three purposes:
- Provide a real time picture of the labor market of interest. To what extent and through which channels will local, low scale manufacture and services firms (hairdressers, tailors, carpenters etc.) be affected by the crisis? Additionally, the data span many different sectors that could be differently hit by COVID-19.
- Shed light on the struggles, needs and fears of current VTIs’ students as well as on what types of support they envision to need in the coming months. Additionally, they will show dropping out and the extent of the learning loss and time use. The research team will then work with the VTIs to organize a response to the crisis. Examples of policies currently under considerations are: fees postpone, mentor reduction, transport subsidies, and mental health resources.
- Inform the adaptation of the main intervention, a tailored individual-level career coaching, to the current circumstances.
