Funded by IPA’s Entrepreneurship and Private Sector Development Program and in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Service and Labor and the City of Kigali, researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation in Rwanda to measure whether AI-powered or standard digital skills reports improve job-search behavior, entrepreneurship activity, and labor market outcomes for young urban Rwandans. They are also assessing whether the measures function equivalently across groups and predict success in specific job contexts. Results will be available in 2027.

The Challenge

Across sub-Saharan Africa, a persistent gap separates rapid growth in the youth labor force from employers' ability to fill entry-level roles. Rwanda illustrates this challenge, with a youth underemployment rate at 45.6 percent and a rate of university graduates not in education, employment, or training (NEET) of 22.7 percent in urban areas.¹ Youth in the capital Kigali largely depend on informal, low-productivity work and experience skills gaps, limited job-relevant information, and weak professional networks. A central challenge is that both employers and job seekers lack reliable ways to identify and communicate soft skills competencies (e.g., emotional intelligence, personal initiative, communication) that are important for workplace success. This can lead to poor job matching that can hinder employers’ business outcomes and job seekers’ future employability. The same signaling problem affects youth pursuing self-employment, who must convince trainers and mentors of their capabilities without conventional track records.

A potential avenue for improving employer-jobseeker matchability is the use of structured skills reports that translate assessment results into a format jobseekers can share with prospective employers. Prior research from South Africa found that jobseekers who received a structured feedback report of their soft skills increased their job search intensity by 36 percent and job offers by 50 percent.² However, open questions remain as to whether standard assessment-based reports and other data that also capture job-search and capacity building behavior produce better outcomes for job seekers and entrepreneurs.

The Program

The Rwanda Digital Entrepreneurship for Vulnerable Urban Youth (DEVY) project supports unemployed youth aged 18 to 34 in Kigali through soft skills training, apprenticeships or internships, labor intermediation services, and entrepreneurship support including coaching, and mentorship, and grants.

As part of this evaluation, participants in the program receive a standardized, two-week intensive soft skills training. Next, participants complete a task-based digital assessment of their socio-emotional skills. Following the assessment, they receive a Skills Passport—a standardized skills report—that they can use to signal their capabilities: to prospective employers in the wage-employment pathway, and to trainers, coaches, mentors, and peer networks in the micro-entrepreneurship pathway. Employers can access shared reports through a dedicated portal, and an edutainment campaign encourages firms to engage with the reports and visit the platform to identify candidates. 

The Evaluation

In partnership with the Ministry of Public Service and Labour and the City of Kigali, researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation in Rwanda to test how skills reporting affects youth across both DEVY pathways—wage employment and micro-entrepreneurship—and whether assessment results, translated into feedback, guidance, and evidence for employers, function equivalently across groups and remain valid for specific job contexts. The evaluation involves 13,000 youth across Kigali participating in the DEVY program, who have been randomly assigned to one of three groups:

• Standard report: Participants receive an interactive report summarizing their assessed skills alongside an employer-shareable link.
• Engagement insights report: Participants receive an AI-generated report that combines assessed skills scores with behavioral indicators drawn from observed job-search activities, such as persistence after setbacks and responsiveness to feedback.
• Assessment-only (Comparison): Participants complete the soft skills assessment but do not receive any report.

Researchers will measure labor market outcomes in both wage-employment and entrepreneurship pathways—employment, earnings, revenue/profits, and retention. Intermediate outcomes include jobseeker self-efficacy, job-search behavior, the behavioral process metrics captured during authentic platform activities.

Results

Results will be available in 2027.

Sources

^1. National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR), Labour Force Survey, Annual report 2023, March 2024

^2. De Martino, et al., forthcoming

Implementing Partners