Authors: Sophie Lashford, Co-Head of Education, Senior Education Policy and Advocacy Advisor, and Chrystal Holt, Co-Head of Education and Senior Education Advisor
As many gather in Bangkok next week, jobs are front of mind. Around 186 million people globally are out of work — and young people are more than three times as likely to be among them. In low-income countries, youth unemployment sits at a stubborn 27%, a figure that has barely moved in seven years.
The scale of what's coming is bigger still. Over the next decade, 1.2 billion young people in developing countries will reach working age — but current projections suggest only around 400 million jobs will be created to meet them.
For the young people who do find work, "employed" rarely means "secure." The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that nearly 300 million workers globally live in extreme poverty, earning less than $3 a day. Having a job and having decent work are not the same thing.
It's no surprise, then, that jobs and skills are dominating the conversation at this year's agenda. The World Bank has taken to calling education "infrastructure for good jobs", a framing which rightfully puts education at the centre of this conversation. Attention is increasingly turning to skills development, to equip young people for greener, more digital, more changeable labour markets.
But infrastructure is only as strong as what it is built on. As World Bank President Banga reiterated in March this year, "Without literacy and numeracy, nothing else is possible — not skills, not jobs, not growth". We cannot leapfrog foundational learning on the way to green, digital, or AI-ready workforces. Literacy, numeracy and social and emotional skills are what make every later investment in skills possible. The jobs agenda cannot afford to skip this step.
Two crises, one root cause
While youth unemployment has plateaued over the last seven years, so has progress on getting children into school and learning. The number of out-of-school children hasn't fallen in that time — it's risen, reaching 273 million in 2025. Access is not the only issue; the learning crisis persists. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 9 out of 10 children cannot read and understand an age-appropriate paragraph.
These are not two separate crises running in parallel. They are the same crisis, at different points on the same timeline. The jobs challenge we're discussing in Bangkok this week was written years ago, in classrooms where children sit through years of school without learning to read, write or reason. We cannot skills-train our way out of a foundational learning deficit. We can only build on what is already there - and in too many contexts, the foundations are simply too weak, leaving children without the tools they need to thrive, not only in their education, but throughout their lives.
So as many in the sector sharpen their focus on skills and jobs, we want to use this moment to make the case for keeping foundational learning — literacy, numeracy, and the social and emotional skills — at the centre, so that these dual jobs and learning crises aren't further entrenched in a downward spiral of worsening productivity and poor human capital development.
The economic case is not in question. Each additional year of schooling in which a child is actually learning is linked to measurable gains in earnings; around 9% higher, on average, per year. Foundational learning remains one of the highest-yield investments in human capital available to any government or donor — a case increasingly reflected in the Bank's own modelling on the economic returns of literacy.
Foundational skills are the gateway, not just a starting point
Hundreds of millions of children are reaching adolescence unable to read a simple sentence or complete basic arithmetic. This is the generation about to enter a workforce that increasingly demands adaptability and higher-order thinking. Without the basic literacy and numeracy that lets them access the curriculum as they progress through school, young people are locked out of vocational training, apprenticeships and formal employment altogether.
In Kano, Kaduna and Jigawa States in Nigeria, our Catch-Up Clubs, run through the UK-funded PLANE programme, give children who have fallen behind on their learning three months of intensive, community-based teaching in foundational literacy and numeracy. In 2025, more than 19,000 children enrolled, over half of them girls. Before the sessions, only 6% of six-to-nine-year-olds could read a simple sentence. By the end, one third of them could. Children who can read can follow what is taught in the later grades, which is what vocational training and apprenticeships depend on. Haruna*, who joined the program at word level and progressed to sentence level, transferred to a new school where he became the top performing student out of 83 pupils in the class - showing how much this work places the children in prime position to excel.
Social and emotional learning can't be an afterthought in laying these foundations either. McKinsey's research on jobs and automation shows that as machines take on more routine technical work, demand for distinctly human skills — judgment, creativity, interpersonal communication — is accelerating, not shrinking.
Foundational learning is the first step towards job-readiness: it's what lets children stay in school, move successfully through each stage, and keep learning as they progress through the grades. Children tell us it's also what creates hope and ambition for their future.
Awa*, who we supported back to school when her education was disrupted by conflict in Mozambique, told us:
“What I most like at school is to learn how to read and write. It’s important to go to school because I see my friends who have finished school getting jobs. They help financially in their homes. And the other thing we learn at school, is to not just sit at home and do nothing.”
Employers want foundations, not just qualifications
Time and again, employers rank transferable skills — problem-solving, communication, numeracy — above narrow technical training. These are what let a worker adapt as a job changes. A qualification bolted onto weak foundations is brittle; it doesn't bend, it breaks the moment the market shifts.
Poor foundational skills funnel young people into low-productivity, insecure informal work, reinforcing the very cycle of intergenerational poverty that jobs programmes are meant to break. These upstream problems can’t be fixed with downstream spending. TVET and job-training systems cannot compensate for weak foundational learning; they can only work with what's already there. Strong foundational learning is one of the clearest levers we have for interrupting the cycle before it starts.
This is an equity issue as much as an economic one
Weak foundational learning intersects with gender norms, disability and displacement to further restrict young people's routes into decent work. A skills agenda that isn't built on strong, equitable foundational learning risks reaching the young people who need it least, and missing the ones who need it most.
In Kaduna State, Nigeria, we are working with the state government on the Reaching Out-of-School Children project, with equity at the centre of the approach. A mapping of more than 360,000 households identified over 187,000 out-of-school children, including 2,305 children with disabilities. Six in ten had never enrolled in school.
The project brings foundational literacy, numeracy and life skills into Qur'anic (Tsangaya) schools, and runs an accelerated basic education programme for children aged 11 to 17 who missed primary school. Under Nigeria's national guidelines, learners who complete the accelerated programme either join formal school or move on to vocational training. More than 25,000 children have returned to learning so far.
Sani*, 17, had studied only in Tsangaya schools for nine years. Six months after joining the project, he can identify the English alphabet and read simple sentences. "I want to become a lawyer," he says, "so I can speak for others and make a difference."
Our ask for foundational learning
In Bangkok and beyond, our message is simple: if education is the infrastructure for good jobs, we need to build that infrastructure from the ground up. It starts years before skills training, in a classroom, with a child learning to read, count, think, and adapt. Skip that step, and everything that follows is built on shaky ground.
Investments in job-ready young people must keep foundational learning at the centre, and intentionally link childcare, early childhood development, foundational learning, adolescent development, and skills and employability — a coherent approach to human capital development that delivers for children and for the jobs agenda now commanding increased attention from the Bank and the wider sector. Get the foundations right, and that attention has every chance of paying off.
With thanks to Marian Hodgkin and Richard Tekdek for their comments.
