An overview of Futuremakers

What is Futuremakers?

Young people, especially girls and young women, often face barriers that limit their economic participation. As part of our commitment to accelerating inclusive and sustainable economic growth across our footprint, we have a responsibility to support this future workforce.

Launched in 2019, Futuremakers is our global initiative to tackle inequality and promote greater economic inclusion. Via various projects, we support young people to learn new skills and improve their chances of getting a job or starting their own business. These projects fall under one of three pathways (education, employability, and entrepreneurship), thus providing support at the critical points on the journey to economic inclusion.

We target a higher proportion of women, girls, and people with disabilities, in support of gender equity and disability inclusion.

Futuremakers by numbers*

*From January 2019 to April 2023

How we measure impact

We know that economic inclusion is a journey, and not something that can be achieved overnight. With this in mind, we developed the Futuremakers theory of change. This outlines how the three interlinked pathways: education, employability, and entrepreneurship, together bring new opportunities for young people to become more economically active.

Central to the theory of change are several stages and elements that together create impact. We define ‘impact’ as the long-term economic inclusion of young people.

Again, this is a long-term aim; there are important milestones where we measure results to mark progress towards these. The three key elements are:

We have not captured these results for every young person reached by Futuremakers projects. Rather, outputs, intermediate outcomes, and outcomes are measured with participants in ‘intensive’ activities only.

The definition of intensive varies across the three pathways, but generally means sustained participation in ongoing trainings, lessons, or mentorships. ‘Non-intensive’ refers to activities such as attendance to one-off webinars, seminars, etc.

Participants in intensive and non-intensive activities together combine to form our ‘reach’ figures across this report.

Defining economic inclusion

Via Futuremakers, we report progress towards greater economic inclusion across three aspects:

Targeted young people enter and remain in decent work.
Social barriers to young people’s participation in the economy are addressed.
Sustained growth of youth-led/female-led and inclusive micro enterprises.

Understanding this report

In this report, we explain the background of our Futuremakers strategy, and the different pathways that bring this global initiative to life. As well as an overview of the activities and results under each of the pathways, we provide a regional snapshot and success stories. We also review where aims and targets have not been met and explain how we’re learning from these.