Educating Youth for Entrepreneurship in Work & Life : Experience of a Junior Secondary School Project in Morocco <Special Issue : Youth, Education, and Work>

National education policies around the globe increasingly highlight the need to equip children and youth with entrepreneurial skills, also called “21st century skills," “employability skills," “core competencies and others. The present article identifies and analyzes these skills, combining the perspectives of employers and the international development sector, and asserts that education and training can and indeed must work deliberately to imbue students with these. The Entrepreneurial Spirit Development Program (PDEE), developed and implemented for lower secondary students by the USAID/ALEF project in Morocco serves to illustrate what a purposeful personal skills development program might be. The experience generated positive outcomes in terms of students' social engagement, academic results, school retention and other measures. Finally, a review of the key findings of an independent assessment of the effects of PDEE (Bouhassoune 2011) on students two years after the project ended provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness of such a program on the vocational “maturity" of students, equipping them for productive professional futures.