Jóvenes en Acción — Colombia's Pay-on-Completion Training-Plus-Internship Model for Excluded Youth

Jóvenes en Acción ("Youth in Action") was launched by the Colombian government in 2001 to tackle youth unemployment among the poorest households (SISBEN levels 1–2). Unemployed 18–25 year-olds in the seven largest cities applied for a limited number of places; because demand exceeded supply, places were allocated by lottery among eligible applicants. Selected participants entered a demand-driven model: private training institutions designed short (roughly three-month) vocational courses matched to local labour-market needs, followed by a further three-month internship inside formal-sector firms that the same institutions had to source. Institutions were paid only once both the classroom and internship stages were completed, tying their incentives to real placement rather than seat-time.
Because access was allocated by lottery among a larger pool of applicants, Attanasio, Kugler and Meghir (2011, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics) could evaluate the programme as a randomised controlled trial covering roughly 80,000 participants from the 2002–2005 cohorts. Women offered training earned 19.6% more and were 6.8 percentage points more likely to hold a paid, formal-sector job than women in the control group; men saw improved job quality (formality, on-the-job training, firm size) but no significant earnings gain. A later long-term follow-up (Kugler, Kugler, Saavedra and Prada, NBER Working Paper 21390) found the gains — especially for women — persisted well beyond the initial post-programme window, with benefits exceeding the programme's costs.
The design — lottery-based access, competing private providers, pay-for-completion, and a compulsory firm internship — has since been echoed by similar "Jóvenes" programmes across Latin America (including the Dominican Republic, Peru and Argentina), making it one of the most replicated active-labour-market models in the region and a template for cities building demand-led, employer-linked training pipelines rather than relying on supply-driven classroom courses alone.

Read the full analysis: https://observatorioalianzapacifico.cepal.org/en/ncsp/programme/youth-action-jovenes-en-accion-2001