the mif blog

Trends is on vacation this week. This post ran previously on our blog. 

By Claudio Cortellese and Mariel Sabra 

For the vast majority of the 160 million youth between 15 and 29 years old in Latin America and the Caribbean, the transition into the labor market is anything but easy. Youth unemployment continues to hover around 13%—three times the rate of adults (5%). When broken down by gender, young women experience higher unemployment rates than their male counterparts (17% vs. 11%). And, of the young people who have been able to find a job, more than half are employed in the informal sector, according to the International Labour Organization. 

By Claudio Cortellese and Mariel Sabra 

For the vast majority of the 160 million youth between 15 and 29 years old in Latin America and the Caribbean, the transition into the labor market is anything but easy. Youth unemployment continues to hover around 13%—three times the rate of adults (5%). When broken down by gender, young women experience higher unemployment rates than their male counterparts (17% vs. 11%). And, of the young people who have been able to find a job, more than half are employed in the informal sector, according to the International Labour Organization. 

In the last decade, Latin America and the Caribbean has revived a debate about industrial policies, often related to initiatives to support small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ more than half of the region’s workforce. These smaller businesses generally have far lower productivity than larger companies, so an improvement in their productivity can have a significant impact.

While it is easier to start a social enterprise today than it was 10 years ago, thanks to more options for networking, support services, and raising funds, it is still very challenging for social enterprises to scale their operations and impact. At the same time, social intrapreneurs – employees within corporations who develop practical solutions to social or environmental challenges– face constraints to scaling their concepts both inside and outside the company. Unlocking scale requires new collaboration between businesses, governments, academia, specialized consulting firms, impact investors, and civil society to establish a robust ecosystem.

The inaugural Scaling Corporate Social Enterprise Conference taking place in Santiago, Chile on November 20-21 is a first step towards bringing these different ecosystem actors together in the Latin American context in order to identify the barriers to scaling corporate social ventures and develop a common agenda to overcome them.