YOUTH Key Youth and Trade Statistics and Arguments Which We Can Use Going Forward

8/10/2019 YOUTH Key Youth and Trade Statistics and Arguments Which We Can Use Going Forward

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Young people are defined as persons aged between 10 and 24.

There are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24, and the youth

population is growing fastest in the poorest nations.Within this generation there are 600 million adolescent girls with specific needs,challenges and aspirations for the future.

In Afghanistan, East Timor and fifteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, half thepopulation is under 18 years of age.

In Chad, Niger and Uganda, half is under sixteen.

The youth promises potential for economic and social progress & how we meet theneeds and aspirations of young people will define our common future.

89% of todays youth population live in less developed countries.

Approximately 120 million young people reach working age every year.

The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and SocialAffairs projects under its medium fertility scenario (often considered the most

likely demographic outcome) thatthe number of 10 to 24-year-olds will reach2 billion by 2050.

India has the worlds highest number of 10 to 24-year-olds, with 356 milliondespitehaving a smaller population than China, which has 269 million young people.

These countries are followed by:

Indonesia - 67 million

USA - 65 million,

Pakistan - 59 million,


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Nigeria - 57 million,

Brazil - 51 million

Bangladesh - 48 million.

Under the high-fertility projection (in which fertility rates descend from todayslevels, but not as rapidly as in other projections), the worlds youth population would

exceed 3.5 billion by the end of the century.

International migrants aged 10 to 24 constituted just over 12 per cent of the worlds

total 232 million international migrants in 2013, according to the United Nations.Most such migrants moved from one developing country to another. While the flow ofyoung people rarely alters the age structure or slows the growth of populationsignificantly in migrant-sending countries, over time it affects population dynamics insome developed countries that receive large numbers of migrants.

HOMICIDE RATES TEND TO BE HIGHEST WHERE YOUTH PROPORTIONSARE HIGHEST:


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Every day, 39,000 girls become child brides or about 140 million in a decade.

The term child here refers to those under 18, generally considered minors.

Expanding livelihoods and employment opportunities for youth requires a number ofapproaches. Since the estimated proportion of the population living in rural areas isvery high in the developing world71 per cent in the least developed countries, 68

per cent in South Asia, 63 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, and 49 per cent in EastAsiaeffort needs to go into expanding livelihoods in rural areas in agriculture, smallenterprises and formal sector employment.

The non-agricultural labour-force is growing much more rapidly than the agriculturallabour-force (UNFPA, 2011). The greatest potential for job creation and raising

productivity and living standards lies in expanding formal-sector employment,especially in the manufacturing sector, which can absorb a large amount of semi-skilled labour. This is because the demand for manufactured goods has far greater

potential for growth in global markets than that for agricultural produce. Themanufacturing sector offers large-scale job opportunities for young people who mayhave limited schooling, while helping countries reap more of the demographicdividend by using the available labour force in more productive jobs.

Increasing the productivity of small-scale and micro-enterprises is critical in ruralareas, where people are increasingly dependent on them to supplement and diversifytheir income (World Bank, 2013). Partly because of population growth, the averagefarm size has shrunk to 1.2 hectares in Asia and 1.8 in sub-Saharan Africa (WorldBank, 2013).

A World Bank study found, for example, that a 10 per cent increase in womensborrowing increases girls and boys schooling enrolment rates by about 8 percentagepoints, while reducing extreme poverty at the household level by about 5 percentagepoints (Khandker and Samad, 2014).

Up to 60 per cent of young people in developing regions are not working or in school,or have only irregular employment.


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Only 10 per cent of young men and 15 per cent of young women know their HIVstatus.

Troublingly, poor quality deters many from going to school. Many countries still haveunacceptably high pupil-teacher ratios, poorly trained teachers, insufficient textbooks,

poor infrastructure, and a lack of female teachers (UNESCO, 2014b). Estimatessuggest that 130 million children stay in primary school for at least four years butnever achieve even the minimum benchmarks for learning.

Child marriage is a human rights violation that remains commonplace in manycountries and most regions worldwideeven where laws forbid it. If current trendscontinue, an additional 142 million girls will be married before their 18th birthday by2020.Between 2000 and 2011, an estimated 34 per cent of women between the ages of 20and 24 in developing regions had been married or in union before age 18; further, anestimated 12 per cent had been married or in union before age 15.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF ADOLESCENTS AND YOUTH

The human rights of adolescents and youth include, among others:

Life, liberty and security

Health

Education

Information

Expression

Association

Poor youth are less likely to have access to digital technologies and thus aredisadvantaged with regard to information and other means of building social capital.Although 30 per cent of youth aged 15 to 24 worldwide in 2012 were digital

natives, that is, with five or more years of online experience, the proportions ofdigital natives are much higher in wealthier countries with better Internet access,ranging from over 90 per cent in Norway and other wealthy countries to under 10 percent in much of sub-Saharan Africa (International Telecommunications Union, 2013).Moreover, studies show that poor youth are much less likely than wealthier youth touse digital technologies (International Telecommunications Union, 2013).


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The percentage of youth aged 15 to 24 classified as "digital natives" is much higher inwealthier countries with better Internet access.

DIGITAL DIVIDE

Sub Saharan Africa: 10%

World: 30%

The cost savings in preventing unintended pregnancy is greatest among adolescentmothers at $17.23 for every $1 spent on contraception for 14 to 19-year-old females.

While some would argue that multifaceted interventions to delay early marriage andpregnancy are costly, the costs of failing to act are high. Researchers at Johns HopkinsUniversity estimated that billions of dollars are lost globally as a result of adolescentchildbirth through decreased earnings from less schooling, with estimates of the totalcost of an adolescent childbirth for a cohort of 35 million girls from 72 countriesranging from $168 to $503 per girl, depending on the rate of return to schooling.

A 2013 review by the World Health Organization estimates that 36 per cent of women

have experienced intimate-partner violence or sexual violence by a non-partner, withlower rates for men (World Health Organization, 2013).

Countries in the late stages of the transition are ones that have experienced markedreductions in both mortality and fertility rates. In this group, the populations age

structure has changed so that the dependency ratio is comparatively small, where theshare of the working-age population is larger than the non-working-age population.This means that the share of the population that is 15 to 64 has grown larger, relativeto the share of the population that is either 14 and younger or 65 and older.


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Approximately 515 million adolescents and youth aged 15 to 24 live on less than $2 aday (UNESCO, n.d.).

For every woman who dies of pregnancy-related causes, an estimated 20 others

experience maternal morbidity, including severe and long-lasting complications, suchas obstetric fistula. As many as 3.5 million women live with obstetric fistula in thedeveloping world, and up to 65 per cent of them developed the condition asadolescents (United Nations, 2014). More than 2 million adolescents between the agesof 10 and 19 are living with HIV or AIDS.


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Approximately two thirds of premature deaths among adults and one third of theirtotal disease burden are associated with conditions or behaviours that began duringyouth. These behaviours may include tobacco use, minimal physical activity,unprotected sex or exposure to violence.

Furthermore, each year nearly 20 per cent of youth between the ages of 15 and 24experiences a mental health condition, and in 2012 an estimated 1.3 millionadolescents died from preventable or treatable diseases (World Health Organization,n.d.).


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YOUTH Key Youth and Trade Statistics and Arguments Which We Can Use Going Forward

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