Labour Market Impacts of a Mental Health and Entrepreneurship Intervention in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Evidence from Young Women and Men
研究将心理健康干预融入青年创业项目并搭配现金转移，发现接受综合干预的青年收入显著提升，尤其女性受益更大，为后冲突地区青年就业培训提供了新思路。
Nearly a billion youth globally are affected by fragility, conflict, or violence, which leads to psychological distress and hinders economic self-sufficiency. While employment training and cash transfers can help, evidence from fragile settings is limited, especially for women. Leveraging a randomised controlled trial, we study the integration of an evidence-based mental health intervention, the Youth Readiness Intervention, into a youth entrepreneurship program with cash transfers in Sierra Leone. Youth who received both interventions experienced significant income gains, primarily from increased self-employment. Importantly, female participants saw especially strong improvements. Our findings point to a novel and potentially impactful youth employment training program structure that combines employment training, mental health intervention and cash transfer that unlocks the benefits of youth more fully and is particularly effective for empowering young women. Our results provide compelling evidence for expanding integrated mental health and employment programs to improve economic outcomes for youth, especially in fragile and post-conflict environments.