The topic for this year's World Development Report is "Development and the next Generation" and it focuses on how policies affecting youth development can affect the economic growth and povety reduction efforts for countries worldwide.
This focus stems from the fact that there are 1.3 billion youths (defined as aged 12-24) in the world today, forming a significant sector of the world's population.
In terms of developing this growing number of citizens, there will be significant problems faced both in terms of finding the means to provide quality education and also giving them sufficient employment opportunities. Conversely, this "youth bludge" also provides opportunities to create more effificient and productive workers with less dependencies.
A couple of interesting points were raised during the report and it made me relfect on the general situation amongst local youths in Singapore. And given that context, there are 3 thoughts I have based roughly on it:
- Firstly, that while local youths have been well able to grasp and deploy factual knowledge, they may well fall short of the other importance criteria which demanding employers are looking out for these days. These include skills such as ability to communicate well, think and analyse facts quickly, solve problems and work well in teams. Many youths are short-changing their educational journey but tackling the grades rather than lessons, seemingly trading off a chance to pick up long term skills for the more immediate benefits.
- Secondly, there are more supply of well-educated youths entering the market than job creation may be able to cope with. This in part explains the government's greater emphasis on the need for entreprenerial business creation as this is one of the methods that can create greater employment for the nation in the long run. While this drive has been successful in the short run, it would take more than risk-taking youths without the entrepeneurial propensity to keep the momentum and culture of entrepeurship going for the long term.
- Thirdly, there is an important need to ensure that the lesser educated youths or youths who made previous mistakes (ex-offenders, for example) are not needlessly marginalized while that rest of the economy drives on. In this respect, we need to ensure that there is an equal emphasis placed on the development of substainable social entreprises which can self-reliantly provide support and assistance to the needy sector of our population. The fact that there has been recent focus on the goverance issues of charity organisations should not be a reason to shun the fact that we still have a pressing need to ensure that our society progresses as a whole, not leaving certain segments behind and unable to fend for themselves.
I believe that if enough youths can develop along these notions and really think hard about how one can bring a difference to the nation, perhaps we can achieve much more, more quickly than what would otherwise be achieved merely by depending on national policy.
[ Official WDR 2007 Website]
[ Watch the Press Release Webcast here ]
1 comment:
I think that some of these developing countries really need to refocus their education policy( assuming the basic education of reading, math and science) have already been met. With the recent changes in technology there is a less of a barrier of people from developing nations to leapfrop realtively quickly. I worked internationally teaching entrepreneurship education, and that is definetely a piece of the pie. We are talking small things like creating and selling small handicrafts. However, stressing technology and entrpreneurship should be simultanous. This is obviously not the path for all, becuase clearly, not everyone has a passion for it. But 1 entrepreneur can create hundreds if not thousands of jobs. Here in the us I think the stat is that 80% of all new jobs come from entrepreneurs. Its something to think about.
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