Human Development

Improving outcomes for infants, children and young people

Half the population in Africa is below the age of 20. We are committed to helping these young people, and their peers in the Middle East, develop to their full potential and make a positive contribution to their communities and societies. We work to improve education, care and support from the critical first 1,000 days of life, through K-12 education, up to young adults’ entry into the world of work. 

We are particularly focused on expanding opportunities for children and young people who lack choice and opportunity. We work with governments, their partners in development, and private and non-state actors to improve the reach and quality of education, care, and support services. We help clients to take opportunities and deal with challenges presented by changes in demography, climate, technology and the shock of Covid-19.

Optimising social protection and child protection systems for human development from within the Young World

Social protection is a set of policies and programmes that protect people against poverty and risks to their livelihoods and well-being. Various mechanisms can provide this protection, including cash or in-kind benefits, contributory schemes and programmes to enhance human capital, productive assets and access to jobs.

Our aim is to support our partners in optimising social protection systems for human development. We do this by reforming policies, improving financing and access, ensuring sustainability, integrating technology for better delivery, and tailoring these systems to contribute to the more holistic development of individuals and societies. This includes leveraging social protection to improve education and health outcomes, ensuring access to earning opportunities and a decent standard of living, and reducing vulnerability to shocks.

Child protection involves safeguarding children from harm and encompasses a range of measures and structures put in place to prevent and address abuse, neglect, exploitation and violence against children.

We work to improve child protection systems by supporting the strengthening of legal frameworks, enhancing coordination among stakeholders, and building the capacity of child protection workers. We have worked with our partners to implement preventive measures through community education and parenting support programmes, ensuring child participation in decisions affecting them, and securing sustainable funding.

We believe that social protection and child protection systems don’t change from the outside. As a Young World firm rooted in Africa, we boast a team composed mostly of senior and junior staff who reside in and originate from the Young World. This grants us access to tacit knowledge, expansive networks, legitimacy and a profound commitment to driving change. We believe in a unified approach to transformation that embodies an inside-out perspective where everyone collaborates on joint solutions. This methodology is deeply ingrained in the firm’s culture of Siyakhana.

Our Social Sectors Financing team is dedicated to advancing human development through diagnostics underpinned by rigorous economic analysis.

We support solution design, backed by understanding the contexts within which we live and work. In addition, we support implementation, where we provide catalytic expertise to existing systems. We strive to create a world where everyone, particularly those marginalised, can achieve their full potential.

Public finance management (PFM) services optimises systems, processes and practices. We propose budget responses most adapted to local contexts, considering an evolving geopolitical landscape, a limping global economy and rising risks.

Underpinned by the “Collect more – Spend better” approach, our interventions involve generating evidence by tagging and tracking, streamlining mechanisms and introducing new forms of budgeting, fostering transparency and accountability, building capacity, transferring skills and building coalitions.

Improving strategy, planning, and putting strategies and plans into action.

Making difficult choices with scarce resources – and then turning those choices into reality – is critical to good service provision. The rapid changes to which human development sectors must adapt give renewed importance to effective strategy, planning, and implementation on a regular basis. 

Using Genesis’ approach to joint solutions, we help human development clients develop robust, realistic, and innovative strategies and plans, and then put them into action.

Optimising the performance of human development service providers and support systems.

Human development at scale requires hundreds of thousands of organisations functioning independently yet coherently, both to provide services (such as schools) and to support them (such as textbook printing). Effective regulation, governance and oversight arrangements are key to this. 

Working with our Competition and Regulatory Economics practice, we help governments improve their regulation of private and non-state organisations, and improve the governance oversight of their own human development systems. We help private and non-state organisations interested in human development to navigate regulation effectively.

Improving the quality and coverage of human development services.

People can develop to their full potential when they have access to quality human development services. We are committed to helping governments, their partners, and private and non-state actors improve these services. 

We support building and running excellent organisations (such as schools or clinics); improving systems for recruiting, training, deploying and managing capable and motivated people (such as teachers or care workers); making sure appropriate goods (such as cash or food transfers), materials (such as textbooks) and technology are available as needed; improving systems for standard setting (such as a curriculum or care standards), verification (such as a single registry for social protection) and assessment; and engaging communities.

Supporting learning, accountability and communication in human development.

Understanding what works and why in human development is not straightforward. Human development systems are complex in themselves and interact with other complex systems. This creates unpredictability: it is by no means certain that what has worked to improve human development outcomes in one time and place will work in another.

However, rigorous and contextual analyses of human development programmes can help improve outcomes. Working with our Evaluation for Development practice, we help human development clients to conduct monitoring and evaluation for the purposes of learning what works and why, of accountability for public or private funding, to take a note of and learn from failure, and to identify and celebrate success.