Adobe in Support of UNICEF
Adobe and UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited are preparing young people with in-demand creative and digital skills for the future of work and enabling them with more opportunities for livelihoods.
Adobe and UNICEF's Generation Unlimited, a leading global public-private youth partnership, are helping to provide young people with the in-demand, transferrable creative and digital skills necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing economy. The partnership is expanding young people's access to education, employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in an AI-powered world.
Addressing the global youth skills gap in the creative and digital economy
The scale of the youth skills gap is global: one in five young people worldwide are not in employment, education or training, and three in four young people aged 15–24 lack the skills needed for employment, while their global unemployment rate is three times higher than that of adults. India and Brazil, home to two of the world's largest and most dynamic youth populations, illustrate both the urgency of this challenge and the opportunity it presents.
India is home to the world’s largest youth population, with over 300 million young people ages 10 to 24. This group has immense social and economic potential. Yet challenges like unemployment, skills gaps and sociocultural barriers continue to limit growth and economic participation. Rapid technological advancements and automation further compound the challenges, leaving underskilled young people without access to learning and earning opportunities in a rapidly evolving job market.
Brazil offers a similar opportunity. The country’s creative economy already employs more than 7 million people and is projected to add another 1 million jobs by 2030. Yet many young people, particularly in remote and underserved communities, still lack access to the structured training and professional networks needed to turn creative talent into sustainable income.
Through a shared value partnership, Adobe and UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited are leveraging their collective expertise to help close this creative economy skills gap, enabling young people with more opportunities for livelihoods in a digital-first future in India and Brazil.
Improving access to in-demand creative skills for young people in India and Brazil
Adobe is the inaugural partner to Generation Unlimited's Creative Academy, which helps equip young people with digital and AI-augmented creative skills and supports opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship. The Creative Academy is more than a training program – it is a global learning-to-earning system that combines creative and digital skills training, portfolio development, and structured pathways to income-generating opportunities, to ensure young people move beyond skilling into dignified and sustainable livelihoods in the creative economy. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model, Generation Unlimited tailors the Creative Academy implementation approach to each context, co-designing programs collaboratively with UNICEF Country Offices, the private sector, governments, and young people themselves. While the implementation approach varies from one country context to another, program data shows that pairing digital skilling with in-person support from facilitators and trainers is key to helping young people complete programs and achieve strong learning outcomes.
The Creative Academy builds on the success of Adobe and UNICEF’s original program pilot. In 2025, Adobe and UNICEF's Generation Unlimited launched a program in India that integrates Adobe's Digital Academy curricula into Generation Unlimited's Passport to Earning (P2E), a global program that provides free, certifiable, market-relevant skills to young people and better positions them to access advanced skilling and earning opportunities. The partnership's "Design Fundamentals with AI" course introduces learners to the core principles of digital design and the creative power of generative AI. Through practical modules, participants explore how to bring ideas to life, mastering everything from layout and color theory to branding and workplace collaboration. Upon completion, participants earn a professional certificate and have built a portfolio through hands-on projects equipping them with the creative and AI-driven design skills that employers look for in the digital economy. To ensure young people in India can benefit from P2E, Generation Unlimited translated the course into Hindi, offering it to young people across the country.
To further extend the course's reach in India, Generation Unlimited onboarded institutions, including government schools, colleges, skilling centers and Common Service Centers (CSCs), to enable learners who typically lack access to professional design tools to participate meaningfully. Embedding the course within existing education systems, rather than as a standalone offering, and deepening collaboration with state governments, built a foundation for sustained scale. In the first year of the program pilot, over 375,000 young people in India completed the course.
These results laid the groundwork for the launch of Generation Unlimited’s Creative Academy and the partnership's expansion into Brazil. In Brazil, the partnership leverages Generation Unlimited's One Million Opportunities (1Mio) platform to implement P2E, which has already connected hundreds of thousands of young people to skilling and employment opportunities. By building on 1Mio infrastructure, the Creative Academy will bridge the gap between informal creative potential and formal livelihood opportunities, positioning creativity as a viable and inclusive pathway to employment, freelancing, and entrepreneurship for young people across Brazil.
Together, Adobe and UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited are empowering young people in India, Brazil and beyond with creative skills that open pathways to employment and entrepreneurship and enable them to design their own futures.
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