The event was organised by the Technical and Planning Secretariat of the Office of the Presidency, the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, and the National Institute for Youth (INJUVE), with the support of the European Union's EUROsociAL Programme for Social Cohesion in Latin America.

Recently the Salvadoran government approved a five-year development plan that includes among its priorities the creation of a programme to boost youth employment and employability.

EUROsociAL is supporting the government in designing this programme, and the workshop was a first step towards starting to define its main characteristics based on the experiences of European and Latin American countries.

The workshop was opened by Tomás Pallás, Head of Cooperation for the European Union Delegation; Sandra Guevara, the Minister of Labour and Social Security; and Lorenzo Tordelli of the IILA in its capacity as coordinating partner of the Employment and Social Policies area of the EUROsociAL Programme.

Chaired by Argentine expert Alejandra Solla, the participants included the Technical and Planning Secretariat of the President's Office and the country's Institute for Youth, which unites the main Salvadoran youth organisations. The Director of Employment of the Costa Rican Ministry of Labour and Social Security, Andrés Romero, who presented EMPLEATE (a programme for training and job-placement of Costa Rican young people); Pablo Morris Keller of Chile's SENCE, who presented the president's programme + Capaz (which aims to place 450 thousand unemployed persons in jobs, 150 thousand of which are young people); Sweden's Public Employment Service presented its experiences with policies for youth and specifically a project it implemented in Cambodia to boost youth employment.

The workshop benefited from the active participation of representatives of civil society, NGOs, youth associations and civil servants from diverse Salvadoran ministries, as well as by representatives of the IDB, ILO and the World Bank.

The workshop represented a fundamental first step in generating consensus and establishing the lines for setting up the programme for youth employment and employability in El Salvador. EUROsociAL, under an agreement with the DUE, will continue to support the process until the design of the programme is approved.