Inequality of opportunity in Peru: How can young people develop relevant skills and find decent employment in a rapidly changing labour market?

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Despite important economic and social achievements in Peru in the last decades, the country's education system and labour market remain both under-developed and highly unequal, hindering young people's possibilities for accessing meaningful jobs. Our research will examine the reasons behind this problem by looking at what drives young Peruvians' decision-making in relation to their higher education, training, and skill acquisition; what constrains the development of skills through childhood and adolescence; and why some young Peruvian men and women are more likely than others to find decent and meaningful work. We follow a three-tier approach:We begin by looking at the factors affecting young people's decision to enrol in higher education, paying particular attention to the types of skills (cognitive and socio-emotional) that young people who access high- or low-quality higher education institutions possess. We also look at what defines young Peruvian men's and women's career choices, highlighting the role of social and gender norms. We then turn to analysing specific sets of skills: cognitive (maths, language), socio-emotional (determination, teamwork), or technical (including digital). We evaluate how these each matter for accessing formal jobs with the aim of constructing education, skill and training profiles for young formal workers. Future earning expectations of young people are also examined to see whether they are matched with the labour market reality. This will shed light on whether incomplete information about the labour market is an underlying reason why young people engage in low-return activities.Next, we focus on inequality in skills acquisition during childhood and adolescence. Specifically we examine who has access to quality education and training and the role of early-life circumstances in mediating the acquisition of relevant skills. We pay particular attention to the extent to which the basic education system in Peru is effective in developing appropriate skills. Ultimately, we aim to identify outstanding schools - those with very good students in challenging settings - and profile them in terms of their teacher, programme, and infrastructure characteristics.Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of two particular initiatives that are aimed at improving skills of young people. The first is a school-improvement program ("Jornada Escolar Completa") that increases both the contact hours in targeted schools and their resources. Second, we examine the potential role of training schemes to offer a second chance to those individuals who are not able to complete their formal studies. We include young people's voices and experiences to shed light on the role of education and training in their work trajectories and of the support and barriers they face in accessing meaningful work. The study is based on analysis of existing data spanning 15 years - on two cohorts of children as they have aged from birth to 15 years old and 8 to 22 years old. This is supplemented with matching information on schools - including their facilities, programmes and teacher qualifications. We will further complement the analysis by collecting new qualitative data (though semi-structured interviews and focus groups) for two subsamples of employed and unemployed youth and of those attending vocational and training institutions to examine how they evaluate the trade-offs between further education, training and work and how they conceptualise meaningful work.The Peruvian case does illuminate the challenges faced by many LMICs that also have made important strides towards increased education, but where hard inequalities persist in terms of learning, acquisition of skills and youth access to meaningful jobs. The high-quality, timely and policy-relevant research that we aim to produce has thus the potential of shaping policy and recommendations in other LMIC countries, beyond Peru.