Global Perspectives on Youth Employment

With falling unemployment in the UK we perhaps risk becoming complacent about the global challenge of youth unemployment.  This piece by Richard Jones for Devex, provides a very useful summary of both the issues and recent initiatives on the international stage.  Highlighting the “dangerous cocktail of high unemployment, precarious and low-quality temporary work, and persistently high working poverty in both the developed and developing world” Richard provides an introduction to the work of RTI on youth employment  and the ongoing efforts on the International Labour Organization who have continually campaigned for more attention to this issue.  There is an ongoing debate about the need for both immediate action (particularly in some countries) and the requirement for long-term sustainable approaches.  These concerns are of course echoed across many different aspects of the international development agenda and it remains to be seen if the work on youth unemployment can be one of the first to make real inroads to the problems and real difference across the world.