UN launches initiative to tackle alarming youth unemployment crisis

A new UN initiative launched here Monday will tackle the alarming crisis of youth unemployment, Guy Rider, director general of the UN's International Labor Organization (ILO) said.

"Forty percent of all young people today under 25 years old are either unemployed or have a job which does not lift them out of poverty," Rider said at a press briefing. "If you are under 25, you are three times more likely to be unemployed than other members of the work force."

Rider said that problem was not limited to unemployment, but is also about the quality of work available, with many young people underemployed, underpaid, or employed in informal or casual jobs.

The Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth will bring together 21 organizations within the UN system to address the problem of youth unemployment -- which threatens to derail many of the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the UN hopes to achieve by the year 2030.

"At a moment when the United Nations is dedicating itself to leaving nobody behind in the 2030 agenda, this is an awful lot of people that are being left behind," Rider said.

Rider said that the initiative was consciously designed by the UN to work directly towards achieving some of the most important SDGs.

However, he emphasized that it was important to include the private sector and governments in addressing the global problem of youth unemployment and underemployment.

Ana Saldarriaga, president of international youth organization AIESEC, said young people make up more than half of the world's population and should be seen as partners in solving youth unemployment, not as the problem itself.

"We need working experience in order to have good paid salary but in order to have this experience we need opportunities," Saldarriaga said.

Azita Berar Awad, Director of the ILO's Employment Policy Department, said youth unemployment is a global issue, affecting all countries and regions of the world.

However, the problem is particularly serious in some North African and European countries, she said, noting that there had been some improvements in Europe in the past year. Enditem