UN: World Will Miss Economic Benefit of 1.8 billion Young People | Common Dreams
The largest cohort of young people ever known is about to find their most economically productive years wasted.
The world population is now passing 7 billion people... of this 7 billion, 1.8 billion are aged between 10 and 24, and 90% of those live in the developing world.
Some 620 million economically active young people ages 15 to 24, about 81 million were unemployed at the end of 2009, the highest level in two decades of record-keeping.
With the world now home to the largest number of young people in history, a new World Bank report on investing in youth will describes the real cost to families and country economic growth when young people are left to grapple on their own with HIV/AIDS and other diseases; violence; unemployment; inequality; and a loss of faith in their ability to join the workforce, acquire new skills to increase their wages and standards of living, raise families, and become proud citizens in their communities.
The opportunity for a demographic dividend is but a fleeting moment... it must be claimed quickly or it will be lost.
Either we do nothing risking alienating youth from the mainstream and instilling in them a legacy of distrust and hopelessness... or we invest in the biggest source of human potential the world has ever had, and reap benefits of that investment through greater growth and social well-being for generations to come.
The potential economic benefits of having such a large global population of young people to potentially go unfulfilled, as a generation suffers from a lack of education, and investment in infrastructure and job creation... what an immeasurable, devastating loss it would be.
