What skills really count? Examining socioemotional skills that matter for youth and adults in Sub-Saharan Africa

In Sub-Saharan Africa, socioemotional skills such as emotional regulation, collaboration, and perseverance are increasingly recognized by policymakers and development practitioners as important for success in work, entrepreneurship, and daily life. These skills are now considered foundational, alongside literacy and numeracy.

Despite this recognition, there is limited clarity regarding which specific socioemotional skills are most relevant, how to measure them reliably, and how best to teach them. Programs targeting populations such as the poor, women, youth, and microentrepreneurs often face challenges in identifying priority skills. Most existing studies rely on self-reported survey tools, which may not be validated for African contexts, leading to uncertainty that affects the effectiveness of interventions aimed at economic empowerment.
 

The ESTEEM initiative

To address these gaps, the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) at the World Bank, in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), launched the ESTEEM (Effective Socio-emotional skills To gain Economic EMpowerment) research agenda in 2018.

ESTEEM aims to define, measure, and test how women’s and men’s socioemotional skills influence their economic outcomes and how training interventions can improve them, initially across six Sub-Saharan African countries: Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Africa, and Tanzania.
 

The skills framework

Most existing skills frameworks either focus on children, a narrow subset of skills, or personality traits (which are higher level, more stable facets, influencing skills, but not skills per se).

The initiative developed a comprehensive framework of 14 socioemotional skills, tailored to the realities of youth and adults in Sub-Saharan Africa. These skills are grouped into awareness (e.g., emotional awareness) and management skills (e.g., self-control) and further classified as intrapersonal or interpersonal (Figure 1).

The list was identified through a rigorous process involving reviews of economics and psychology studies, commonly used terms across disciplines and frameworks (e.g., CASEL, Goleman Emotional Intelligence), expert consultations, and focus groups and cognitive testing (assessment of how respondent interpret questions) with local populations.
 

The skills measures

Most programs rely on survey-based self-reports – simple and inexpensive, yet susceptible to bias (i.e. respondents may select socially desirable responses, compare themselves to their restricted social circles, or respond differently according to their level of confidence and how they value the skills). Moreover, many instruments are imported from western contexts, often yielding limited validity in sub-Saharan African settings.

To address these limitations, ESTEEM combines standard self-reports with newly developed, complementary tools to measure each of the 14 skills with greater reliability and objectivity:

1. Self-reports: Aggregated responses to 7 to 14 statements associated with a given skill (rather than a single global self-rating); for example, “I finish whatever I begin”, for perseverance.
   
   
2. Behavioral assessments, using either of the following two methods:
    

• Situational judgment tests: Hypothetical scenarios in the household, workplace, or community — each tied to economic empowerment — eliciting likely responses. For example, a situation measuring emotional regulation asks how respondents would react to a family member accidentally damaging their business, with options including yelling and calming down before talking to the family member. These measures reduce domain ambiguity and social desirability.
• Interactive tasks: Continuous performance tasks capturing focus and attention (e.g. tap on the screen if the letter X showed up), a triangle-counting game for perseverance, and structured open-ended prompts from the surveyor to gauge active listening and problem-solving, among others.
   

What have we learned so far?

1. Different measure types yield different results: A study in Tanzania found that measures based on self-reports overstated men’s socioemotional skills and gender gaps in skills due to distorted beliefs about men’s and women’s skills and social desirability bias among men (the tendency to answer self-reports the way society would see it favorable). Meanwhile, behavioral assessments revealed small or no gender gaps.
   
   
2. Behavioral measures are better predictors of work: Across Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Tanzania, behavioral assessments of skills, such as relationship management skills and perseverance, predicted employment and income better than self-reports. The latter were more correlated with mental health. Since behavioral measures were less correlated with social desirability, this suggests they are better instruments for program evaluation.
   
   
3. Gender norms shape women’s socioemotional skills and entrepreneurial paths: In Nigeria, women applying to agribusiness entrepreneurship programs were less likely to choose profitable sectors than men, a gap partly attributable to lower socioemotional skills and restrictive gender norms (open-access version). These findings indicate that interventions to foster socioemotional skills should address the broader cultural factors influencing women’s choices and opportunities.
    

What’s next?

Forthcoming research uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate how training in different sets of socioemotional skills, such as awareness versus management, and interpersonal versus intrapersonal skills, impacts jobs, income, and gender equity across varied populations and delivery methods. These insights will offer practical guidance for designing programs that support economic empowerment and gender equality.

Based on ESTEEM, IPA and J-PAL, launched a companion research agenda and research fund to support evaluation of programs fostering socioemotional skills for workforce development and entrepreneurship.