1. Soft Skills within the Context of Positive Youth Development, and their Importance for Sustainability

• In Event: Building life skills/soft skills/21st century skills at scale and sustainably in LMICs

Proposal

Soft skills are a key component of asset building and form the foundation for successful youth agency and contribution, three key domains of Positive Youth Development (with the enabling environment being the fourth one). While there has been an increasing recognition of the value of soft skills for youth in finding jobs, controlling emotions in Social and Reproductive Health outcomes or violence prevention, few K-12 curricula or programs for out-of-school children include soft skills.
A systematic review by YouthPower Learning documents how positive youth development (PYD) approaches have been applied in LMICs and what the evidence demonstrates about the effectiveness of such programs and the relevance of soft skills within these programs. Other YouthPower programs have assessed the importance of soft skills in different environments. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the evidence on how soft skills impact sustainable youth development outcomes, and also present the results of a soft skills survey of young changemakers in low- and middle-income countries.

Author

• Maria Brindlmayer, Making Cents International