South Asia, despite impressive growth and poverty reduction over the past two decades, remains home to more than half a billion poor people, large numbers of whom have little or no education and suffer from poor health. Part of the reason is that South Asia has some of the worst nutrition indicators in the world. Research clearly shows that a person’s cognitive development begins in the early years of life, long before formal schooling begins. Nutrition and early childhood development have a strong positive relationship with educational achievement and significant payoffs for lifetime learning and labor market productivity. The challenge of generating more productive jobs is intensified because most of the countries in the region are still in conflict or have only recently emerged from it and many people face serious problems related to access to opportunities based on gender, caste, and socioeconomic status. More and Better Jobs in South Asia attempts to answer three questions:

• Has South Asia been creating an increasing quantity and quality of jobs?
• What are the determinants of the quality of job creation and what is the employment challenge going forward?
• What demand- and supply-side bottlenecks need to be eased to meet South Asia’s employment challenge in the face of intensifying demographic pressure?