Reproducibility package for When Aspirational Videos Meet Socio-Emotional Skills Training: Experimental Evidence From A Youth Employment Program In Côte D’ivoire

Socio-emotional skills training is increasingly embedded in youth employment programs, often alongside aspirational content, yet evidence on how these components interact remains limited. We evaluate a randomized controlled trial with 6,023 urban out-of-school youth in Côte d’Ivoire. Participants were assigned to a control group or to a multi-component employment program whose socio-emotional modules emphasized either intrapersonal or interpersonal skills, and were further randomized to one of two sets of aspirational videos or no video. Impacts differed substantially by gender. For women, both training packages without a video improved labor market participation, and the intrapersonal arm additionally improved sexual and reproductive health, raising contraceptive use and reducing the likelihood of being pregnant or breastfeeding. For most outcomes, we cannot reject equality between the two treatment packages. For men, effects were limited. Adding either set of videos largely eliminated women’s labor market and reproductive gains, though the videos on shared-responsibilities were also associated with reductions in specific forms of violence among women and with stronger social networks among men. We find little evidence of changes in socio-emotional skills, aspirations, or gender attitudes. Qualitative evidence suggests improvements in confidence, planning, and day-to-day decision-making, while the videos appear to have increased the salience of risks and constraints facing young women. Our results suggest that a multi-component skills program can improve women’s economic and reproductive outcomes, but also that seemingly complementary motivational content commonly used to reinforce training may erode these gains when increasing the salience of barriers that women remain unable to overcome.