YOUNG AND EDUCATED, YET JOBLESS: HOW NGOS CAN HELP PREVENT LOSING AN ENTIRE GENERATION’S PERSPECTIVE
While interning at the UN, I’ve had more than a few moments that have affected me in a very deep way. One of those happened at DPI/NGO’s Briefing on Social Integration and Intergenerational Solidarity on 16 May. At that Briefing, speaker and Associate Social Affairs Officer Elizabeth Niland stated: “so long as young people are unemployed, so long as young people aren’t heard or can’t participate, so long as girls and women are not allowed to participate, we won’t have social integration.” She went on to say that we as a global society need to invest in young people, because unemployed or otherwise disempowered youth are not able to come to an intergenerational encounter on an equal footing with their elders.
Ms. Niland’s statement affected me in a deep way because it spoke to a fear that I am not alone among today’s young people in having. It is a fear that more than a few of us try to stifle most of the time. We’re afraid of what will happen after we graduate. We ask ourselves: Will we be able to find jobs? Will we be able to support ourselves? Will the investments we’ve made in our educations pay off? Will we be able to pay the debts we’ve incurred pursuing our education and avoid damage to our credit ratings? In an era of economic crises, slowdowns and shifts, do we dare to hope that we might have a prosperous future ahead of us in which we are empowered to pursue our career goals, take care of our families and push for the betterment of our societies?
The numbers show plainly that these fears are not unjustified. The UN defines youth as being people between the ages of 15-24. 75 million such youth are unemployed. That’s 41 percent of the world’s unemployed population. We tend to think first of countries hit by the euro crisis like Greece, with its shocking 58 percent youth unemployment rate at the end of 2012. However, the International Labour Organization (ILO) finds that skyrocketing youth unemployment is indeed a problem that spans much of the globe. Perhaps not surprisingly, developed countries and the European Union have been the worst hit, with nearly a 25 percent increase in youth unemployment in between 2008-2012. But alarming upward youth unemployment trends in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa are also evident. In North Africa, we saw youth unemployment rise by 13.8 percent from 2008-2012. Furthermore, we also see that some economies with general unemployment numbers that are lower than some of their more crisis-stricken peers still suffer from stubbornly high youth unemployment. Sweden’s average unemployment rate sits at around 8 percent, yet its youth unemployment rate is three times that. Canada may have general unemployment of around 7 percent, yet 14 percent of Canadian youth are searching for work and can’t find it.
UN Photo/Rick Bajornas
Youth unemployment remains much higher than general unemployment and it keeps rising. The problem is worse than even the grim statistics suggest, as the numbers do not include youth who have given up looking for work, or those who have taken on unpaid internships to gain experience in the absence of opportunities for paid work. Furthermore, we have never seen a generation so educated be so unemployed. Quite simply, we have a crisis on our hands. Yet there still seems to be an insufficient sense of urgency in tackling the youth unemployment problem.
I encourage governments and civil society to view youth unemployment not as a youth concern, but as a global concern that all of us need to act on. If the problem of youth unemployment remains unsolved, many dire challenges will await us in the future. Demographic pressures will be exacerbated, as countries with declining population trends will lack sufficiently skilled young workers to replace retiring ones, which will in turn jeopardize the tax revenues governments need for the budget priorities their peoples ask for, including health care for our world’s elder populations. Depression in larger numbers of jobless youth will put a strain on overall health costs. Potential productivity will be lost as well, including from job dissatisfaction on the part of youth who find low-quality jobs because upward opportunities have dried up. In short, it is not only young people who will lose out if a solution to this crisis isn’t found, everyone will.
Numerous experts, as well as the ILO itself, have identified a skills mismatch to be a contributing factor to high youth unemployment. Simply put, youth are not being taught the skills they need to take today’s jobs. But other experts, notably from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have also observed that the global economic slowdown has led employers to prefer more experienced candidates who have been laid off from their previous jobs. Quite simply, when the economy slows down, youth are the first to be fired and the last to be re-hired.
UN Photo/Evan Schneider
There are a few things civil society can do about all this, both internally and externally:
1. Since the will to solve the youth unemployment crisis needs a boost, NGOs can start pushing harder to line up political support behind solutions. This can be done by spreading the word about the severity of the problem, and also by pushing for, and helping to implement, particular policies. These can include advocating for education policies that address the skills mismatch, or depending on your NGO’s mandate and resources, perhaps providing such training and scholarships yourself.
2. Lobby for policies that aim to provide some employment opportunities specifically to youth, including apprenticeships.
3. Push for, or provide, assistance to unemployed youth with their job searches. This can include interview training and counselling.
4. Promote training and access to credit for youth who wish to start their own businesses.
5. Look at your own NGO and ask yourself how intergenerational your workplace is. Does your NGO have energetic younger staff just starting their careers working alongside senior staffers with lots of experience? Young staffers often come with fresh perspectives informed by the latest techniques in their fields, as well as an intuitive understanding of technology. An NGO that does not take advantage of youth resources available to it is missing out much the same way as a youth-dominated NGO would miss out on the inspiring leadership, informed by lots of experience, that working alongside a senior staffer can provide.
6. All NGOs, and not just youth ones, should encourage young people to actively participate in their democracies. Voter turnout among youth has been decreasing in several countries for years, while people in older demographics still vote in large numbers. A renewed push to get more young people to the ballot box will give an incentive to politicians to deliver on policies that help young people get into jobs.