Creating Decent Work for Young People: Policy Recommendations of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Employment Network

Abstract

This presentation will focus on presenting the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Employment Network including its political dimensions, some of the policy orientations which underpin this Network and their implications for active labour market policies of countries at different levels of development. More than 1 billion people today are between 15 and 25 years of age and nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population is below the age of 20. However, eighty-five per cent of young people live in developing countries where a vast majority of them are struggling to learn and work in a context of extreme poverty. According to World Bank figures, approximately 1.2 billion people struggle for survival on per capita incomes of less than $1 per day. Throughout the world, young people are two to three times more likely to find themselves unemployed when compared to adults. Kofi Annan, in his report to the Millennium Summit of the United Nations, writes that demography is not destiny and that “if I had one wish for the new millennium, it would be that we treat this challenge as an opportunity for all, not a lottery in which most of us will lose.” Within these statistics as our backdrop, what are the political dimensions of the Secretary-General’s Youth Employment Network? You may recall that in September 2000 the largest