Employment

Did you know that in many regions, unemployment among youth is easily 2-3 times higher than for adults. Especially in developing countries, the school-to-work transition can be a long and tedious process, during which young people leave school, become jobless and spend time moving between unemployment, inactivity and informal employment. In fact, youth have often been found to effectively act as a "buffer," absorbing shocks disproportionately during negative business cycles, but not benefiting accordingly during economic booms.
What is it like for youth in your country? And is the global financial crisis impacting the situation still further? 

The World Bank's Y2Y Global Youth Conference is holding an essay contest on this topic, and wants your ideas on the questions: 

What are the constraints to youth entrepreneurship in your country? Has the global crisis changed the dynamics? How can governments help young entrepreneurs to create and further develop their social and productive ventures?

For more info, visit the Y2Y Community website.

The annual Global Youth Conference is organized by the World Bank's Y2Y group. For this year's conference (scheduled for October 22, 2009 in Washington, DC) the organizers want to hear from you! What would you like to see at the conference this year? Is there an issue you are passionate about and do you want to hear from a particular speaker?

From the little island of Malta, I now blog from Ann Arbor, Michigan—my home for the Northern hemispheric summer… The links between the two distant spots date back to organized emigration programs, where hundreds were encouraged to take the trip to the empire of Henry Ford and other production lines in search of greater and better opportunities.

I have landed in what is certainly a very different socio-economic picture. Malta and Michigan seem to have little in common apart from the presence of a Maltese community here and a spate of returned migrants from the US whose houses fly the stars and stripes on what is now the “other side” of the Atlantic. Yet these economically successful migrants are a generation dying out.

My first 6 weeks of officially working for Ayadi Organization I did on-the-ground research of various crafts around Egypt.  I was looking to find a craft that has been passed down for hundreds of years and that would benefit from working with Ayadi.  My vision was not to create something new.  I didn’t want something redundant or to recreate the wheel if it had already been created and spinning, but rather to build on others' work and make more impact. 

To name just a few of the beautiful craftsmanship that are part of  Egypt's rich and dying cultural heritage, I saw glass being hand-blown in the City of the Dead in Cairo, pottery in Fayoum (1.5 hours from Cairo), mother-of-pearl boxes being cut and assembled, etc….  Every time I saw a new craftsman at work I wanted to work with him.  But of course to be realistic and to have impact, I decided to start with one craft for a 6-month pilot project, and then expand or reassess.