Over the last decades in Brazil productivity has stagnated, unemployment has risen, and labor force participation has reached a historic low. The Covid-19 crisis has only exacerbated these challenges.

With support from Fundação Arymax, B3 Social, Potencia Ventures, and the Inter-American Development Bank, J-PAL LAC launched the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative in Brazil to evaluate innovative strategies that address the country’s urgent employment challenges.

JOI Brazil will focus on four priority research areas:

• Supply and matching: Reducing job search barriers
• Job creation: Helping firms grow and hire more workers
• Future of work: Equipping workers to meet changing labor demands
• Cross-cutting issues: Gender, race, and quality of jobs

Building off the success of the worldwide Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI) launched in 2020, JOI Brazil will fund new research that builds rigorous evidence on creating quality employment opportunities in Brazil, and will work with Brazilian governments, civil society, the private sector, and foundations to ensure that the evidence is used to inform future policymaking.

Strengthening Evidence-Based Policies

JOI Brazil activities include:

• Hosting social innovation incubator events to generate impact evaluations of promising policy solutions.
• Bringing together civil society, governments, and researchers in piloting and testing innovations.
• Funding pilot studies and randomized evaluations.
• Sharing evidence with NGOs, government agencies, and donors to inform policymaking.

Bringing Together Brazilian Labor Policy Stakeholders

JOI Brazil hosted a webinar to announce the initiative’s launch and engage Brazilian actors interested in developing and evaluating innovative labor market solutions.

Three hundred representatives from civil society, government, and the private sector attended, many of whom had no experience conducting randomized evaluations. Participants sought guidance on how to build evaluations into their work—an indication of the high demand for rigorous evidence in the labor sector.

JOI Brazil is organizing follow-up workshops for attendees to strengthen partnerships with the initiative and co-develop new research projects.

Watch the webinar:

JOI Brazil is grateful to our funding partners for enabling this work:

In partnership with: