Challenge

VDAB wants to introduce the mechanism of a Social-Impact-Bond or SIB in Flanders and use it for an employment project stimulating ‘lost youths’ in Antwerp to search for and find a job.

With a SIB, a government organisation concludes a contract with an external contractor or social service supplier and a private investor or financier to tackle a complex social problem. In the event of success (actually solving the problem) the government organisation pays the investment back to the financier with a return (or bonus) resulting from the savings that solving the problem has yielded to the government organisation.

In order to explore and test the value of the SIB construction for use in the labour market, the VDAB uses the Antwerp NEET youth as a pilot project. NEET stands for Not-in-Education-Employment-or-Training. These are young people who have sort of ‘disappeared from the radar’, and who are extremely difficult to stimulate to employment.

The VDAB attaches three objectives to this project:

• Examine whether a SIB as an instrument for public-private partnership makes sense for use in the labour market;
• Guiding the Antwerp NEET youths to employment;
• In case of success, develop a platform so that Flemish public authorities can use SIBs more easily in the future, not only in the labour market but also in other policy areas.