This report will examine the large and complex youth employment challenge in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, where there is an “urgent need to create employment for 4.5 million youth” and where over half of all youth lack proper work. Mindful that much of the region’s youth cohort is restive and unemployed, Liberia’s ‘rebel behavior’ and ex-combatant youth among them, the report will also consider the implications of providing ‘productive and decent work’ for youth; that is, work that promises to put youth on the road towards acquiring respect and professional development as well as compensation. The report will conclude with a description of an employment programme for some of the region’s most marginalized and overlooked: poor, unemployed urban youth.