Netherlands for the World Bank

Your guide to the World Bank Group

Netherlands for the World Bank

International Day of Education 2026: Education Works

Education is the foundation to skills development and jobs, and the surest way out of poverty, empowering generations to earn an income and drive economic growth. A good education equips learners with key foundational skills—literacy, numeracy, and socio-emotional competencies—which are essential for work and life. These skills help today’s children become tomorrow’s productive workers and enable workers to reskill or upskill later in life. The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, with a $26.4 billion portfolio across 81 countries, supporting 324 million students to date with better education.

On this International Day of Education, we look at why education works, and how it helps propel people out of poverty, putting economies on a path to growth.

“Credit: World Bank Group. All rights reserved”

Jobs, Skills, and the Potential of AI in Kenya

One of the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI) is that it can help us carry out tasks untitledfaster and with fewer errors than humans. I wanted to test this on analyzing labor market demand and skills gaps. So, earlier this year, I partnered with Headai, a Finnish company, to apply an AI-enabled labor market assessment tool in Kenya.  We used the tool to analyze: (a) online job advertisements from select online job portals in Kenya and (b) computer science curricula from the University of Nairobi and Moi University to identify the gaps between what the labor market is looking for and what the university curriculum is providing.

World Bank blogs

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Will you be employed? Skills demanded by the changing nature of work

In 1997, Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players in history, lost a chess match image007to a supercomputer called Deep Blue. Some years later Kasparov developed “advanced chess,” where a human and a computer team up to play against another human and computer. This mutation of chess is mutually beneficial: the human player has access to the computer’s ability to calculate moves, while the computer benefits from human intuition.  

This is the future of work – not just machines replacing humans but also machines augmenting humans. The future is: Human & Machine.

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