The Framework for Action outlines the parameters for promoting youth employment by the members of the YES Global Alliance. It is built upon the principles contained in the Global Knowledge Resource's Effective Practices and upon the recommendations of the Secretary General's High-level Panel on Youth Employment. The Framework for Action creates the structures leading to the fulfillment of the Summit Goals which includes the following:

• What are the guiding principles behind effective practices in youth employment?
• What underlying processes do these follow?
• What guidelines relate to these principles and processes?

More specifically, the Framework for Actions was built upon "four E's" outlined by the YEN as being the four top priorities for all national action plans: Employability, Equal Opportunities for young men and young women, Entrepreneurship and Employment Creation. The Youth Employment Summit has added two additional E's as adopted in the Alexandria Declaration: Environmental Sustainability and Empowerment. The descriptions of the six E's are as follows:

Employability: To ensure access for all youth to appropriate education and training followed by adequate support during the transition to work, regardless of their location or background. We cannot confront the challenges of tomorrow with yesterday's skills. Educational institutions must show unprecedented imagination and vision, using new tools for new times. They must impart marketable skills, promote self-esteem and shape a worldview that embraces the new, opens up to the other, and rises to the challenge of the untried.

Employment Creation: To adopt those policies that will encourage job-led economic growth, reduce the bias towards capital, and foster the institutional structures that can provide the advantages of scale at both the production and marketing phases of micro-enterprises supported by micro-credit. The corporate sector has a major responsibility in supporting micro-enterprises and self-employed youth through mechanisms of franchising, outsourcing and buy-back arrangements.

Equity: To provide equal opportunities for all to realize their full potential. Education, health and nutrition are fundamental rights for all. Special attention must be given to the needs of the disabled, the rural, and the marginalized groups in society, and above all, to young women,whether in education or when entering the labor force for the first time, and who in many parts of the world still suffer from discriminatory barriers. No society has truly advanced by depriving itself of the talents and abilities of half of its population.

Entrepreneurship: To engender the special creativity of youthful entrepreneurs, who see social and economic opportunities where others only see problems. Entrepreneurs, whether they are working in the villages or in the capital markets, are the visionaries who generate livelihoods for themselves and for others. We need to encourage, nurture and support their quest for the new and the untried.

Environmental Sustainability: To seek sustainable employment opportunities based on attention to water, land, energy, the atmosphere, biodiversity and eco-system management. It would be shortsighted to destroy our environment in the quest for transient employment opportunities.

Empowerment: To harness the uncommon opportunities of the ICT revolution to include the excluded and reach the unreached in terms of knowledge and skill empowerment. The whole constellation of institutional arrangements from credit to resource-use, from marketing to connectivity and content, must be structured in a way that empower youth in their quest for sustainable livelihoods.

Click here, to download the Framework for Action.

For the more information on the Secretary-Generals High-level policy recommendation to the Youth Employment Network, go to www.ilo.org/yen.