Youth@Risk

Empowering Young Mothers: A Transformative Journey with the Innovation Foundation

In 2021, the Innovation Foundation embarked on a new project, Youth@Risk, with the mission to create meaningful change in the lives of young people facing significant barriers to employment.

The Genesis of Youth@Risk

The journey began with extensive global research to identify which young people were most at risk of workforce exclusion. The team first looked at global data from public sources like the ILO and OECD, plus Adecco Group data on employment trends. They then mapped the ecosystem of players who impact the lives of opportunity youth and conducted consultation calls with dozens of practitioners. These ranged from educators to government officials and from global institutions to community-based organisations. The consultation calls provided valuable insights into the recurring struggles faced by young people who are striving for economic independence.

A particularly striking trend emerged: out of opportunity youth in general, young mothers faced even more intersecting challenges – complex responsibilities of parenthood, social exclusion, limited access to education, and lack of time to study or build skills. These insights helped the Innovation Foundation team define the Youth@Risk project’s end users: young mothers, aged 16 to 24, NEET (not in education, employment, or training), living at or below the poverty line and on the urban fringe. The research showed that these young women had ambition and drive but lacked curated information about the world of work and the ability to showcase their skills and competencies. Thus, the goal of the design process became to empower these young women by providing clearer pathways into work, helping them to value and be valued for the skills they have, and providing access to local resources to develop their employability.

Identifying the Right Geography

The Innovation Foundation’s solution design is by definition place-based, but replicable. Mexico City provided a good design location for the initiative due to its high rates of teen pregnancy, significant employment barriers, and an existing network of partners in the youth employability space with whom to collaborate. With Plan International Mexico and YouthBuild México, the team identified the borough of Iztapalapa as the ideal location to design and pilot its solutions.

Collaborative Innovation: The Working Group For the ground-up design process, the Innovation Foundation assembled a diverse Working Group of 15 experts from various fields, including youth employment practitioners, technology developers, government representatives, corporate leaders, and young mothers themselves. Using a mix of design thinking and systems thinking, the Working Group undertook an intensive ideation process to develop solutions that addressed the core challenges: lack of access to curated employment information and inability to identify and showcase existing skills and competencies. Through a series of three design workshops, the Working Group first developed many ideas of how to solve the challenge, then narrowed to a short list of solution concepts through a process light prototyping, refinement, and many rounds of on-the-ground testing.

The short list was finally reduced to the two most promising solution concepts to build:

A Social Campaign to engage young mothers and show them they have the possibility of balancing parenthood and a career. It is designed to look and feel like information coming from a trusted friend. Partner: YouthBuild México
An AI-driven tech Solution that translates a young mother’s lived experience into skills and competencies. It generates a CV and helps the individual reflect on the kind of work that would best suit them. Partner: SkillLab

Building and Testing Scalable Solutions

With the solution concepts scoped, two Venture Teams were created to turn them into real products. Each was comprised of an entrepreneur-in-residence (now called a Venture Lead), Fellows seconded from the wider Adecco Group, and partner organisations on the ground. The teams created and tested working prototypes that were constantly testing in the field. In sprint 1, the two teams worked separately, but in complement. The campaign team created draft materials and took them out into the field.

They engaged directly with young mothers in Mexico, in their own environments, by visiting schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and even private homes to understand the context on the ground see what would resonate. They ran a social media campaign and a series of workshops with local partners. The response was overwhelmingly positive – over 200 mothers signed up within weeks, confirming the strong demand for such an initiative.

The tech solution team focused on understanding the daily lives of young mothers and how they spent their time. This allowed them to modify SkillLab’s product to amplify the lived experience aspect of the tool.

In sprint 2, the two products and project teams were rolled together into one, to drive the complementarity of the solutions. The second sprint focused more on refining the combined solution, testing its viability on the ground, and creating a road map to scaling them for greater reach.

The results were undeniable. The social campaign (called Mamas Chingonas) reached nearly two million people and attracted over 6,000 young mothers to the platform, of which over 5,000 used the SkillLab tool and took active steps to improve their employability. They were then directed toward the training and employability services being offered by YouthBuild México and their 35+ local community partners, thus plugging them back into their own communities.

Scaling the Solution

Following the success of the two sprints, the Innovation Foundation began to scale the solutions. In 2024, the aim was to prove that the solutions could scale beyond the original target audience of young mothers and beyond the location of Mexico City, and to demonstrate that YouthBuild México could take the lead and scale sustainably without the ongoing investment of the Innovation Foundation.

The results far exceeded the expectations. By the end of 2024, the, Mamas Chingonas/SkillLab solution has expanded into 19 different cities across Mexico, with an ambition of 40+ in 2025. In addition, YouthBuild México proved that it could step up to lead the local expansion and attract sustainable financing. They now lead, with the Innovation Foundation taking an advisory role.

With Mexico underway, the Innovation Foundation is now scaling the solution into Brazil and broader opportunity youth. This will help the team to see how best to localise language and culture. Based on this, the ambition is to create a scalable, localisable “solution in a box” that can expand its reach to many more countries at speed, via a set of vetted partner networks over the coming years.

A Vision for the Future

What started as an experiment to test a new form of corporate philanthropy has evolved into a movement that empowers young mothers to break the cycle of poverty and exclusion through employment and education. By combining human-centred design, cutting-edge technology, and a commitment to social impact, the Innovation Foundation has laid the groundwork for global change—one young mother at a time.

As the project continues to scale, it serves as a testament to the power of collaboration, innovation, and the belief that when given the right tools and opportunities, individuals can rewrite their own futures.