Financial Crisis

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.

We asked for your views on the financial crisis; how you're seeing it impact your countries and how it's changing people's everyday lives around you.
We got answers from all over, and want to say thank you to all those who responded. From Chile to Nigeria, we got a really broad range of insights, and it was interesting to get your views and experiences. Some said their countries were feeling a tremendous impact; for others, only in certain sectors.

In any case, the global economic situation is certainly affecting everyone. Sharing ideas, discussing the issues, and understanding them, is one place to start tackling it. As Cécile from France writes, "new information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, allow each individual to become an international cooperation actor."

Take a look at what you said. 

Today’s global financial crisis is very much reminiscent of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.  With the exports and labor-intensive industries being hit harder than Banda Aceh was with the tsunami that swept through its coasts, women were the most adversely affected.  This was because of the strong gender composition of many of the most vulnerable industries today.

This Chinese proverb is my recent favorite! In my previous blog, I drew a very pessimistic picture of the future due to the financial crisis. Of course it is a crisis and its negative, but here I will talk about some quintessential optimists, who are in search of the silver lining.

I will present an example from a town near my city. The financial crisis has undoubtedly affected remote corners of the world. However, I have been noticing a growing tendency in India (especially among the government bodies) to put the blame for any problem, irrespective of the logic, on the ongoing financial crisis! This is supposedly the “in” reason for each and every problem that we face these days. This municipal corporation (local government body) was contemplating postponing the repair of the local roads due to the above-mentioned reason. When this news reached a construction expert, he teamed up with a plastic recycling unit (whom I had mentioned in my first blog) to present a much cheaper and more durable alternative to repair the roads using recycled plastic! Currently, work is going on as an experiment on a 1-km stretch and I have received news that it has been so successful that other towns will soon adopt it!