Tackling Psychological Barriers to Job Search and Employment in Kenya

Young adults in urban sub-Saharan Africa face difficulty finding and retaining good jobs and (partly as a result) often experience anxiety and depression. In pilot data, over 40% of our target population have clinically significant anxiety or depression symptoms, which predict lower employment rates and earnings. We evaluate a scalable intervention targeting these challenges: Work-related Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (WCBT). WCBT teaches psychological techniques to manage negative emotions and challenging situations at work and during job search. We use a randomized controlled trial with young jobseekers from low-income areas of Nairobi, Kenya to evaluate how WCBT affects income, employment, in-work productivity and job search, relative to psychologically inactive placebo workshops. We use lab-in-the-field work tasks to capture productivity effects, and conduct endline surveys at 3 and 12 months. Our trial is the first in the economics or medical literature to adapt work-focused CBT to a low-income context and to measure how any type of CBT affects precisely-measured productivity and job interview performance. It also aims to build conceptual understanding of how skills taught in CBT matter at work. WCBT targets helping people from among the poorest areas of Nairobi move up the income distribution. We design WCBT as cost-effectively scalable: it is delivered through group workshops by non-psychologist counselors following structured handbooks. Our psychologist collaborators previously developed a WCBT program in the United States and specialize in guiding laypeople to administer treatments with high fidelity. Our trial will be implemented by the Busara Center between June 2025 and June 2027.