The Impact of Providing Training to Young Men on Labour Outcomes and Attitudes towards Migration in Northern Guinea-Bissau

Abstract The initial objective in this paper was to evaluate the impact of an integrated active labour market programme (ALMP) on young males’ labour market outcomes in the Bissau-Guinean regions of Cacheu and Oio. The programme had three elements—classroom vocational training, on-the-job training and business training. The intention was to evaluate the effects of each of these elements of the programme on employment, income and the propensity to migrate. A randomised controlled trial (RCT) was implemented with 302 young men who were eligible to participate in the programme, where 151 men were allocated to the treatment group and 151 men to the control group. Only eighty-five were compliant with the programme. This meant that sample sizes for the three elements of the programme became small. The three elements of the programme were combined to provide an estimate of the overall effect of the programme. Given the problem of compliance both the Intention-To-Treat effects (ITT) and the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) were estimated, the latter using instrumental variables. The ATE for the three outcomes were large. On average, participant's incomes increased by 70,000 XOF (106 EUR) and employment probability by some sixty percentage points. After treatment, only 2.4% of the participants had made arrangements to live permanently in another country, compared to 15.9% of individuals in the control group. Whilst it did not prove possible to identify which programme was most successful the results suggest that some aspects of the ALMP did achieve their objectives. A qualification to this positive finding is that a cost–benefit analysis showed it was relatively inefficient and costly. The return on investment (ROI) was −59.9%, and the benefit–cost ratio (BCR) 0.4, whilst similar ALMPs present a weighted average BCR equal to 2 and a weighted average ROI of 37.2%.