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| The youth unemployment time bomb: the XV Malente Symposium staged by the Dräger Foundation on 19 and 20 October in Lübeck places youth unemployment, which is on the rise worldwide, firmly on the political agenda.
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| Lübeck, 21 October 2004 – a handful of figures is all Jean-Louis Sarbib, Senior Vice President of the World Bank's Human Development Network, needs to spotlight the dramatic proportions of global youth unemployment: in the next ten years, around a billion young people will reach employment age and crowd the world's labour markets. 60 percent of the population in the Middle East and Africa are below 25 years old. Already today, 47 percent of the 186 million people unemployed worldwide are young people. In South Africa, for example, youth unemployment equals 50 percent. Youth unemployment in the countries of the Third World is threatening social peace and economic development across entire regions of the world. Even in the "rich North", though, things are far from perfect– in East Germany, for instance, youth unemployment is at an alarming 16 percent, stresses Professor Dieter Feddersen of the Dräger Foundation's Board of Trustees. |
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| The world is living with a time bomb. This was reason enough for some 400 high-ranking international experts to take time out to attend the Dräger Foundation's XV Malente Symposium, entitled "youth@work" in Lübeck, to discuss ways of defusing the volatile situation. And in this case, among the experts were also young people from all over the world. Reflecting the need for the co-determination of young people in social processes – something which was stressed repeatedly throughout the conference – the Dräger Foundation, together with the German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), the Youth Employment Network (YEN) of the UN, ILO (International Labour Organization) and World Bank, and the World Organization of the Scout Movement, invited young people to attend an international dialogue on the subject of employment ahead of the conference. |
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| "Poverty can only be reduced by creating new jobs!" This is the credo of the World Bank, as formulated by Sarbib. Education is the key lever in this context which the World Bank seeks to activate as early as possible – ideally even pre-school. It invests over a billion dollars in early education programmes. Besides improving education, the World Bank believes that it is particularly important to provide help when young people are looking for their first job upon leaving school. If they fail to find a job at this stage, their chances of ever finding qualified employment sink dramatically. |
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| For Eveline Herfkens from the United Nations, on the other hand, such programmes, however worthy, are no panacea for the problems. The former Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation believes that the main cause of youth unemployment in the countries of the Third World are the trade restrictions imposed on them by the industrialized nations. "The EU's sugar protocol prevents jobs being created from Brazil to Mozambique."
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| And although she denounces the fact that Germany, for example, spends only 0.28 percent of its gross domestic product on development aid (despite committing itself 34 years ago in a UN resolution to a figure of 0.7 percent), she sees the payments of the rich countries as being of lesser importance: "The trade barriers which protect our markets against products from the Third World must be removed – this will help more than any development aid!" |
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| Professor Robert Chambers from the University of Sussex goes one step further in his criticism of development aid to date. Holding up a map of the world, he turns it upside down – showing that it is all a question of perspective. "Fighting poverty through jobs – that is western, urban-oriented thinking!" He believes this does not fit with the reality of how people live in the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, where most people live in extremely basic agricultural communities in which "jobs" in the western sense simply do not exist. A student from Uganda corroborates this: 1.6 million people in his country live in refugee camps – they need other skills to survive than are provided by the World Bank's educational programmes. |
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| One point from this radical position remained the topic of further discussion – the need for measures not to be controlled centrally but locally, and to involve young people themselves in the decisions within the programmes ("empowerment"). Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli, the young founder of an employment initiative in Nigeria, also emphasizes the importance of small, local projects: "Such projects can quickly produce visible successes, and we need these successes to prove to politicians that changes are possible. This way, politicians can be influenced from the grass-roots level!" This is a view which Dr Bernd Eisenblätter, Director of the GTZ, shares: "It is important to understand how young people think, to regard them as a partner and to contribute to the credibility of politicians. This is why GTZ – as demonstrated at youth@work – promotes dialogue between decision-makers from politics, business and civil society, including the youth organizations." |
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| Brazilian Labour Minister Ricardo Berzoini explains one example of how this "empowerment" strategy can be put into practice. "Everyone talks about young people as a resource, but everyone treats them as a problem. Our aim is to stop this." His government is planning to fight youth unemployment above all by helping people to help themselves. Together with the YEN initiative, it launched a programme this year to involve young people in all social decision-making processes. At the same time, highly pragmatic ways out of unemployment are on offer: for example, the state grants micro credits for young people wishing to start their own business, and rewards companies which employ young people with tax relief. After all, as the minister says, unemployment is not only an economic problem, but a social stigma that prevents people from taking an active part in society – a vicious circle. |
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| New, flexible approaches which can be adapted from region to region are needed – and a number of practical examples from all over the world were presented for discussion in working groups at the symposium. One important issue was enterprise as a career opportunity, especially in the Third World. "Creating" entrepreneurs, however, is no easy task – according to one working group on this topic, just 20 to 30 percent of the population have the mental capacities to start their own business. Thus it is all the more important, stresses Hendrik Södermann from the World Organization of the Scout Movement, to strengthen entrepreneurial abilities by making available additional, extracurricular educational courses. |
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| One member of the working groups raised an aspect which is linked directly to the root cause of the entire problem: "The most important job a child can have is to play. Let the children play!" When considering youth unemployment, after all, there is one other statistic that should not be forgotten – in the year 2000, 185 million children were engaged in child labour rather than going to school – which in turn prevented them from obtaining a qualified job in the future. |
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| Contact:
Dräger Foundation: Petra Pissulla. Phone: +49/(0)451/8822151 / Fax: +49/(0)451/8823050
Drägerwerk AG: Dr Welf Böttcher, Corporate Communication.
Phone: +49/(0)451/8822201 / Fax: +49/(0)451/8823944
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(c) Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, 2007 |
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Ansprechpartner:
Dr. Welf Böttcher
Leiter Unternehmenskommunikation
Tel +49 451 882 2201
Fax +49 451 882 3944
welf.boettcher@draeger.com
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