Pathways to Prosperity: Solutions for Youth Skills and Livelihoods
Drawing on insights from 30+ organizations, this report explores key challenges and opportunities in youth livelihoods and presents clear, actionable Calls to Action.
About
The largest generation of young people in human history - over 1.2 billion - is coming of age amid extraordinary possibility and uncertainty. This generation holds immense potential to drive economic growth, advance social progress, and shape a more inclusive and sustainable future. Yet, the gap between what young people are capable of achieving and the opportunities available to them continues to widen.
While this generation of youth is poised to transform our future, their potential is constrained by limited pathways to empowerment and livelihoods, making youth employment one of the most urgent development imperatives of our time. Hundreds of millions of young people, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), are unable to build secure futures.
When youth are economically excluded, severe consequences are felt in their lives, their communities, their countries, making rectifying this challenge a global imperative. NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) status has an adverse effect on young people’s physical and emotional health and well-being, leaving them vulnerable to poverty and exclusion. This has a long-term scarring effect on life outcomes and limits participation in civic and political life, weakening democratic representation.
Supporting youth along the learning to earning continuum requires creating a shared understanding of the challenges, opportunities, and solutions related to youth livelihoods programming. The diverse stakeholders in this area – youth, governments, the private sector, civil society, multilateral organizations – must align in their understanding of and language on learning to earning. This requires quickly and adaptively integrating new and emerging evidence into the conversation about how to support youth to achieve their potential.
The Pathways to Prosperity: Solutions for Youth Skills and Livelihoods report addresses this necessity by bringing together a consolidated base of rigorous academic research and complementing it with cutting-edge insights from the Generation Unlimited’s public, private and youth partnership base to inform and strengthen public-private-youth collaboration on youth livelihoods.
The report proposes a set of specific, tangible, and actionable Calls to Action that can help us all to work together to support young people. From co-creating solutions with youth and investing in youth-led entrepreneurship, to developing new innovative financing tools and generating better evidence, these recommendations are grounded in a shared understanding - when young people thrive, societies thrive.
