This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10-24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, focusing on their opportunities to learn skills and access capital and assets to engage in income-generating activities (IGAs). Participatory group exercises and individual interviews provide many examples of how young people learn skills and start small businesses, as well as an insight into their strategic thinking about engaging in these livelihood options. Various factors, including the effects of AIDS, are shown to affect young people's prospects of succeeding in their ventures. Young people are very keen on starting IGAs, and are supported by adult members of their communities in asking for interventions to help them. We argue that expanded vocational and business training, focusing on locally appropriate types and scale of businesses, coupled with help to raise start-up capital has the potential to improve the chances of young people who are poor and/or AIDS-affected securing sustainable rural livelihoods in their futures. Since AIDS is intertwined with many other issues affecting young people's livelihoods, it is problematic to single out and target only AIDS-affected young people with interventions on skills building and IGAs. Policymakers' attitudes to vocational skills training and support for IGAs in Malawi and Lesotho are also explored, and policy recommendations made to support vulnerable rural young people in their attempts to build sustainable livelihoods.

CEEQUAL is a British assessment and award scheme for improving sustainability in civil engineering and the public realm. The scheme was developed in 2003 and has gained recognition in the UK and Ireland. The interest in CEEQUAL is starting to spread to the rest of Europe and to the Swedish Transport Administration.  

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the scheme from the perspective of the experience of implementation using two case studies in the UK – a road project and a railway project. The road project is represented by a subordinated project within the Olympic Park, a development for the London 2012 Olympic Games. The railway project that is being studied is the Crossrail programme, a large railway project in London.

The objectives for this thesis are to:

• Review experiences from CEEQUAL awarded projects and to evaluate what additional sustainability benefits the award has given infrastructure projects compared to using normal standards.
• Identify costs and resources required for a CEEQUAL Award.
• Identify if it is possible for clients to require the use of CEEQUAL and stipulate a certain rating.

The results from the two case studies are analysed and applied on the Swedish Transport Administration, together with information about CEEQUAL and the definition on sustainable development.

Some of the conclusions of this thesis are:

• That the effect CEEQUAL will have on a project’s sustainability performance depends on what the normal standards are as well as the client’s requirements.
• The CEEQUAL scheme provides structure for projects to work with environmental and social issues.
• CEEQUAL makes social issues more visible and creditable.
• There is need for something that complements CEEQUAL to be able to say anything about project’s environmental impact, for example EPD or Carbon foot printing.
• It is important that CEEQUAL is a part of the working process otherwise it will cost extra time and money to do the assessment.
• It is possible for clients to have CEEQUAL as one of the requirement within the procurement process. It is also possible to require that a project is delivered with a certain CEEQUAL rating.

Finally, my recommendation to the Swedish Transport Administration is to use CEEQUAL and apply for the award for different representative project and implement the CEEQUAL-thinking in their normal standards for all projects. If they register certain selected projects they can meet the requirements from the government commission and this can also work as a way to calibrate how they are performing on environmental and social issues to the rest of the industry. CEEQUAL can also work as an environmental quality assurance in projects where EIA isn’t mandatory.