JOI Brazil’s first year promoting evidence generation and use within Brazilian labor markets
Increasing labor force participation of vulnerable populations can contribute to efficiently reducing poverty. By increasing employment and entrepreneurship, workers can generate income, expand their power of choice, and improve their quality of life. Among eighteen countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region, Brazil had the fifth highest unemployment rate for ages 15 to 24 in 2020.
However, the evidence to date shows mixed results on such approaches’ effectiveness at reducing poverty, and further evaluation is needed to understand the impacts of employment and entrepreneurship programs in real-world settings. The Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI) in Brazil seeks to address this evidence gap by funding innovative and rigorous randomized evaluations in the country to understand the impact of different strategies on labor market conditions in Brazil.
In May 2021, J-PAL LAC, with support from Arymax Foundation, B3 Social, Potencia Ventures, Inter-American Development Bank, and Insper, launched the JOI Brazil as J-PAL’s first initiative in the country. The concomitance of the initiative’s first anniversary and the International Workers' Day this month marks an important opportunity to reflect on JOI Brazil's activities over the last year and its long-term strategy for improving labor market conditions in Brazil.
JOI Brazil has had many accomplishments within its first year—ranging from launching the initiative’s first funding competition, to starting a social incubation process, to disseminating evidence at policy events. Among these highlights, we are pleased to announce that Tide Setubal Foundation has joined JOI Brazil as a new partner organization.
Welcoming Tide Setubal Foundation
Since the beginning in May 2021, JOI Brazil has been generously supported by partnerships with five founding organizations that bring different, complementary points of view to make this a successful initiative. The inclusion of the Tide Setubal Foundation allows us to expand our activities in Brazil, build more partnerships, and fund additional randomized evaluations over the next four years.
Tide Setubal, a family foundation from Brazil, is dedicated to addressing socio-spatial inequalities. They will contribute to JOI Brazil’s work by supporting the identification and evaluation approaches that address the specific needs of communities who live on the periphery of urban areas and are often isolated from opportunities concentrated in cities.
Funding research across JOI Brazil’s four focus areas
The initiative’s most recent focus has been laying the groundwork for and launching JOI Brazil’s first funding competition with the academic leadership of three co-chairs, Marianne Bertrand, Claudio Ferraz, and Rodrigo Soares.
JOI Brazil will fund randomized evaluations within the initiative’s four main focus areas:
- labor supply and matching,
- job creation,
- future of jobs, and
- social issues and labor markets.
The initiative also funds research that addresses cross-cutting issues common within these four focus areas, including: gender, race, youth, soft skills, regional inequalities, green jobs, and job quality.
By supporting the generation of rigorous, real-world evidence, JOI Brazil aims to better understand the impact of strategies to get job seekers into the workforce, ease young people’s transitions into the working world, provide the skills entrepreneurs need to succeed, and help small businesses grow and innovate in Brazil.
In parallel, we constantly work on identifying Brazilian researchers, based either in the country or around the world, who are focused on labor markets evaluation and have important knowledge of the local context, to invite them to team with researchers from J-PAL’s network and apply for JOI Brazil funding. The collaboration of the selected candidates to J-PAL’s network contributes to building more rigorous evidence on promising social innovations in the labor sector in Brazil, with a keen eye to the particularities of local conditions, problems, and underlying causes.
Launching the social incubation process
In late 2021, we launched JOI Brazil’s first social incubation cycle with a webinar, attended by hundreds of professionals from the government, private, and non-profit sectors. Organizations, carrying out innovative work within at least one of JOI Brazil’s four focus areas, applied and were selected to participate in a capacity-building workshop where they learned how to produce and use rigorous evidence, and developed their own evaluation and monitoring plan.
The first social incubation process is now in its last step, in which the organizations will potentially collaborate with researchers from the J-PAL network to implement their evaluation plans. This innovative model, which combines training and academic matchmaking, aims to strengthen the culture of evidence-informed decision-making within the labor markets sector in Brazil.
Disseminating evidence to policymakers
As we build strong partnerships with program implementers, we look to deepen our efforts in promoting evidence-informed decision-making through labor markets policy events throughout the region. During JOI Brazil’s first year, we disseminated findings from global labor markets evidence at several events in the region.
For example, in November 2021, JOI Brazil’s manager Edivaldo Constantino discussed the literature on ethnic and racial discrimination in the labor market at an event hosted by the Secretariat of Labor, part of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security of Brazil. These occasions are important opportunities to promote evidence use, share results and policy lessons from randomized evaluations, and build new relationships with practitioners.
Looking forward
With the strong foundation of JOI Brazil’s first year, our goal is to expand the evidence on solutions to labor market challenges in Brazil.
In the upcoming months, the initiative will launch its second round of the social incubation process, in which we will work with a new group of organizations to increase the diversity of policies and programs evaluated in Brazil. We encourage program and policy supervisors who are dedicated to increasing the inclusion of people experiencing poverty in the Brazilian labor market to contact us at [email protected].
The initiative will also host seminars to promote evidence on subtopics within its four focus areas. The events will be open to the public, and project implementers interested in informing their policies and programs through rigorous evidence are especially welcome.
Finally, JOI Brazil will continue to facilitate connections between our network of researchers and practitioners who wish to evaluate their innovative programs so that new rigorous evidence can be generated in the country.
By raising awareness about evaluation and monitoring, and supporting rigorous evaluation of policies in real-world settings, JOI Brazil will be able to help identify effective innovations and collaborate with decision-makers to scale programs that benefit people experiencing poverty.
To stay up to date with research findings and related policy implications, subscribe to our mailing list and select “Labor Markets” as a sector interest area.
The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated labor market challenges in Brazil. More so than ever, we need evidence-based solutions. With support from Fundação Arymax, B3 Social, Potencia Ventures, and the Inter-American Development Bank, J-PAL is bringing the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI Brazil) to Brazil to evaluate innovative strategies that address the country’s most pressing employment challenges.
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The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated labor market challenges in Brazil. More so than ever, we need evidence-based solutions. With support from Fundação Arymax, B3 Social, Potencia Ventures, and the Inter-American Development Bank, J-PAL is bringing the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI Brazil) to Brazil to evaluate innovative strategies that address the country’s most pressing employment challenges.
The jobs challenge (and opportunity) in Brazil
The Brazilian labor market faces a variety of challenges to achieve inclusive access to productive work. Productivity has stagnated in recent decades despite the average level of education almost doubling from 1981 to 2014. People of color in Brazil are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and in informal work. Brazil will also need to adjust to changing labor market dynamics such as an aging population, the digital transformation of services, a push for greater flexibility in labor regulations, and increasing automation.
In 2019, Brazil was in the midst of a slow economic recovery from a financial crisis, in which the country saw a sharp increase in unemployment. The Covid-19 crisis has only exacerbated Brazil’s labor market challenges.
The IMF projects that the unemployment rate will reach 14.5 percent in 2021. Many Brazilians left the labor force entirely last year—the labor force participation rate, which averaged 62 percent in 2019, hit a historic low of 55.1 percent in the third quarter of 2020. Groups that were already underrepresented in the workforce, such as women and youth, were especially hard hit.
These dynamics affect millions of workers. The interruptions in women's careers may negatively impact their labor market performance in the future. Likewise, the transition period from school to the labor market is a decisive time for youth, and economic downturns can be particularly disruptive to their work trajectories. These are just a small sample of the many effects—both temporary and lasting—that we can anticipate in the years to come. More than ever, we need to respond to these challenges with informed solutions.
Applying a global lens
Impact evaluations from around the world have identified innovative labor market programs that increased employment rates.
However, more research is needed to understand the mechanisms that drive positive impacts of employment programs and adapt and scale them in other contexts. More research is also necessary to know how to grow the number of jobs in an economy and how private sector firms can expand opportunities for job creation.
In Brazil, we believe that these strategies could help governments, NGOs, and foundations, who face difficult budgetary decisions, make better and long-lasting decisions to support vulnerable families.
Launching J-PAL's Jobs and Opportunity Initiative in Brazil
Last year, with support from Google.org, J-PAL launched the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI) to answer some of the most pressing questions related to employment facing policymakers, employers, and job seekers. Google.org’s anchoring investment focuses in sub-Saharan Africa. JOI had a busy first year, funding more than twenty projects that seek to answer important questions in labor markets policy.
With generous support from Fundação Arymax, B3 Social, Potencia Ventures, and the Inter-American Development Bank, we are thrilled to bring the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative to Brazil this year. Our work will be implemented in collaboration with our host university in Brazil, Insper.
We seek to fund policy-relevant research that will help inform the policy debate on important economic opportunity issues and inform the decisions of project implementing partners, donors, and other stakeholders working in this space. Our ultimate goal is that through these efforts, the quality of labor programs increases and that livelihoods of Brazilians are improved.
Over the course of five years, JOI Brazil will:
- Host social innovation incubators that crowdsource innovative policies and programs in the Initiative’s priority topics.
- Provide technical assistance to the most promising innovations to help them design impact evaluations of their programs.
- Connect Brazilian NGOs, government agencies, and researchers to partner in piloting and testing innovations.
- Host calls for proposals with dedicated funding for pilot studies and randomized evaluations in Brazil.
- Share research results with Brazilian NGOs, government agencies, and donors to ensure that the evidence generated through JOI Brazil is used to inform future policymaking in Brazil.
The goals of JOI Brazil are to improve our understanding of how to best promote quality employment and disseminate this knowledge to governments, civil society, the private sector, and foundations in Brazil so that policies and programs can be informed by scientific evidence.
Looking forward
We are excited to share this news and look forward to collaborating with researchers, partners, and practitioners in Brazil to advance this ambitious agenda. In the coming months, we will share more details about JOI Brazil and the different ways to be part of it through a launch event and a dedicated webpage.
In the meantime, we are currently hiring an Initiative Manager, based in São Paulo, to help us launch the activities in Brazil. Please help us spread the word about this exciting job opportunity! J-PAL will also seek to hire two more positions, also based in Brazil, to be announced on our careers page.
Stay tuned!
JOI Brazil’s social incubation process aims to support organizations in developing an evaluation proposal that can be funded through JOI.
The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated labor market challenges in Brazil, where over the last decades productivity has stagnated, unemployment has risen, and labor force participation has reached an historic low.
With support from Arymax Foundation, B3 Social, Potencia Ventures, Inter-American Development Bank, and Insper, J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) launched the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI) in Brazil to evaluate innovative strategies that address the country’s most pressing employment challenges.
JOI Brazil builds off the work of J-PAL’s global Jobs and Opportunity Initiative, driving rigorous research into priority questions in the labor markets space, including: What policies are most effective at improving labor market conditions? Under what circumstances does firm growth lead to job creation? Which design features of skills training programs have the most impact? How can economies best prepare high-skilled and lower-skilled workers for changing labor demands?
Over the next five years, JOI Brazil will fund new research that builds rigorous evidence on creating quality employment opportunities in Brazil, and will work with Brazilian governments, civil society, private sector organizations, and foundations to ensure that the evidence is used to inform future policymaking. Research anchored in scientific evidence will help identify effective interventions and scale-up the mechanisms that consistently impact people's lives.
How does it work?
JOI Brazil maps the trends of labor market challenges in Brazil and those actors who have been working to find innovative solutions for them. The initiative works on two fronts: social incubation, a three-stage process focused on capacity building for policymakers and program implementers; and technical and funding support to Brazilian researchers on priority JOI Brazil topics via research assistants sponsored through our direct research incubation support (DRIS) program and competitive funding to implement impact evaluations.
The social incubation process
JOI Brazil’s social incubation process aims to support organizations in developing an evaluation proposal that can be funded through JOI. In three free-of-charge phases, the process offers information, capacity building, and personalized technical assistance to policy and program implementers in governments, international agencies, foundations, civil society, and the private sector.
The process began with a webinar to announce the initiative’s launch and engage Brazilian actors interested in developing and evaluating innovative labor market solutions (a recording is available here), and will continue through mid-February. Read on to learn about each phase and how to get involved:
- On November 4, 2021, JOI Brazil hosted a webinar on “Consistent Evidence and Best Practices in Evaluation: Meet JOI Brazil and be part of the J-PAL evaluation process,” where we were pleased to have the contributions of Diana Coutinho (Vice-Rector and Director of Advanced Studies, ENAP), Livia Gouvêa Gomes (Labor Market Specialist, IDB), Luis Junqueira (Co-founder, Letrus), and Bruno Ferman (Professor of Economics, FGV EESP) in conversation with Paula Pedro (Executive Director, J-PAL LAC) and Edivaldo Constantino (Manager, JOI Brazil). Three hundred representatives from academia, civil society, government, and the private sector attended, many of whom had no experience conducting randomized evaluations and sought guidance on how to build them into their work—an indication of the high demand for rigorous evidence in the labor sector.
- In the second stage of the incubation process, JOI Brazil will hold a capacity building workshop on January 17-21, 2022. Through a combination of classes and exercises, participants will learn how to design and implement rigorous impact assessments and make progress on developing their evaluation proposals. Interested organizations may fill out the registration form, which is open until January 12, 2022.
- In February, JOI Brazil will provide personalized technical assistance to finalize impact evaluation proposals from selected organizations, with the aim to maximize the chances of success of receiving funding from JOI Brazil. Interested organizations can fill out the application form, which will be open from January 24 to February 8, 2022. Results will be published on February 10, 2021.
We will also accept applications from organizations that did not take part in all three stages. The 2021 cycle is the first of at least five, and JOI Brazil’s social incubation process is open to any organization interested in conducting impact evaluations of its policies, programs, and projects whose themes align with JOI Brazil’s priority issues. We look forward to connecting with organizations interested in generating rigorous evidence through impact evaluations.
Please reach out to JOI Brazil’s Manager Edivaldo Constantino ([email protected]) to connect with the initiative.
Por favor, entre em contato com Edivaldo Constantino ([email protected]), Gerente da JOI Brasil, para se conectar com a iniciativa.
One in three female workers in Latin America and the Caribbean are self-employed, but female microentrepreneurs encounter numerous unique barriers to running successful businesses that can vary across countries. A growing body of literature suggests that alternative training programs may be more effective than those delivering more traditional curricula.
One in three female workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are self-employed. Surveys in eight countries across the region showed that about fifty percent of firms with five or less employees—micro firms— are run by women. These numbers demonstrate how important women are to the workforce in LAC.
Micro and small firms are also key and serve as the predominant form of economic activity in low and middle-income countries. Despite this, there is a significant gender gap in business performance. When compared to businesses run by men, female-owned firms are smaller in terms of employees, sales, costs, and physical capital. Additionally, women face more challenges in growing their micro-firms into small and medium-sized businesses.
Female microentrepreneurs encounter numerous unique barriers to running successful businesses that can vary across countries. Households’ responsibilities and social norms related to chores at home could be some obstacles. For example, a survey from Mexico in 2002 examining micro-firms found that, on average, women entrepreneurs devoted about 25 percent fewer hours to their business relative to male microentrepreneurs, potentially due to family or household obligations. In Bolivia, another survey from the World Bank in 2007 found that 71 percent of female business owners perceived family obligations or household chores as an obstacle to their firm’s operation and growth and were 14 percent less likely to have taken part in any business training than men. Further still, a survey from the World Bank in 2008 focused on Peru did not find meaningful differences between female and male entrepreneurs regarding schooling and hours devoted to the business.
Emerging evidence on skills training
One approach to helping female microentrepreneurs overcome these challenges is business training. However, training women in standard management practices may be insufficient to make their businesses grow if they face additional barriers like economic constraints and rigid social norms. There is limited evidence on how the impacts of alternative business training models vary for women, and the studies that examine the impact by gender find mixed results. However, a growing body of literature suggests that alternative training programs that are delivered one-on-one, tailored to participants’ needs, teach easy-to-apply skills, or foster entrepreneurial mindsets may be more effective than those delivering more traditional curricula. Therefore, it is worth checking whether alternatives to the traditional business training models are better suited to address female entrepreneurs' needs.
As part of J-PAL LAC series blog series launched this past International Women’s Day, we are outlining lessons for policymakers from randomized evaluations of three promising programs conducted in countries across LAC that address the gender gap in business performance.
The promise of alternative training in LAC
One alternative model of training is heuristics, or rule-of-thumb, training, which aims to simplify standard business training into a set of routines that can be more easily understood. Rather than trying to teach accounting, for example, such training focuses on basic financial principles like keeping household and business money in two separate drawers. This type of approach holds appeal for training the smallest businesses and business owners lacking formal education in these areas of need.
Heuristic training in the Dominican Republic
The first example of Heuristic training we present was a study conducted in the Dominican Republic. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation and found that a rule-of-thumb financial training, in which nearly all participants were women, was indeed more effective than standard accounting training in improving business’ best practices among microentrepreneurs with incomplete high school education or without previous financial training.
Heuristic training in Ecuador
Similarly, in Ecuador, a rule-of-thumb financial training increased daily profits and sales, particularly among female microentrepreneurs and people experiencing more stressors and things to keep in mind, such as taking care of children or house duties. While evidence on the long-lasting effects of heuristics training is in its initial stages, this simplified training model shows promise in supporting the most vulnerable microentrepreneurs.
Role models training in Chile
Lastly, J-PAL affiliated professors Jeanne Lafortune and José Tessada, together with Julio Riutort, evaluated another alternative training model in Chile, where over 90 percent of the participants were women. The researchers incorporated role models or personalized advice into standard training programs, including testimonial sharing from previous participants of a traditional training program who became successful microentrepreneurs. The study found that Role models increased confidence among less experienced participants and were more cost-efficient than technical assistance. Role models helped to increase participants’ aspirations in addition to confidence.
These alternative and personalized training programs are promising paths to improve management among female microentrepreneurs, but it is still necessary to conduct more research on them. Although they were implemented in three different countries of LAC, they are experiences that could be adapted and piloted across the region if we understand what drives their results.
Designing programs tailored to female entrepreneurs’ needs
Alternative business training programs that are tailored to participants’ needs, teach easy-to-apply skills, or go beyond traditional curricula to foster entrepreneurial mindsets could be an effective solution to mitigate the gender gap in business management and, as a result, the income gap.
J-PAL has two initiatives that could address this issue by funding and supporting the generation of rigorous policy-relevant research in LAC:
- The Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI), expanded in 2021 to Brazil as JOI Brazil, will provide targeted funding to test the most promising innovations addressing pressing employment challenges in Brazil. JOI Brazil will then disseminate the knowledge created to governments, civil society organizations, the private sector, as well as foundations in the country. The initiative will prioritize gender as a cross-cutting issue throughout its research topics.
- The Gender and Economic Agency Initiative also funds randomized evaluations of strategies to enhance women’s economic agency. A priority theme is enhancing women’s labor potential and work readiness.
If your organization is implementing or planning to implement projects focused on alleviating the gender management gap or strategies to enhance women’s economic agency contact us at [email protected]
This blog post is part of a blog series commemorating International Women’s Day. Register here for receiving a notice when new pieces are published. You can also check the first and third blog posts of the series. We want to thank Daniela Muhaj, and María Paz Monge for their input on this piece.