On November 21 we six IYTT Youth Fellows Joe Earnshaw, Elena Vocale, James Mottram, Jonathan Ziener, Lisa Lundgren & Ollie Gee, together with Urban Strandberg, Director & Co-founder, IYTT, presented Working Paper No 8 – December 2024 titled ‘Global Youth Unemployment as a Systemic and Personal Problem: Exploring Views on Employment Among Youth Themselves’ to the World Bank Management.

It has always been our mission at the IYTT to give young people a platform to express their beliefs and opinions in their own words, unobscured and unadulterated. Therefore, following a conversation focusing on tackling youth unemployment with Anna Bjerde, the World Bank’s Managing Director for Operations, in May this year, we felt that we could address their need for greater research on this issue whilst staying true to our own ideals.

What we present today is not the usual report filled with abstract macro data and statistical economic analysis, instead, this is a deep dive into the views of young people themselves, some of whom have first-hand experience of youth unemployment and all of whom are acutely aware of the pressing nature of this issue. By asking our 356 person strong global youth panel to reflect on a variety of questions around youth unemployment, approaching the issue from a variety of angles considering everything from structural barriers to employment for young people to individual agency and reasoning in decisions to reject employment, we have created a study that is both broad and deep whilst assuring that the voices of young people are never sidelined, especially in the conversations that most concern them.

Overall, this paper acts as a critical steppingstone to further exploration of youth unemployment on a case-by-case basis. The main conclusions drawn out from our qualitative analysis of youth panel responses as well as a broader literature analysis, that the negative effects of unemployment are disproportionately felt by young people although vary based on factors such as gender and region, that there is a significant value mismatch between young people and employers, and that the underlying structural causes, rather than effects, of youth unemployment are insufficiently understood, push us to seek to develop this study further with the ultimate goal of finding solutions to youth unemployment nationally, regionally, and globally.

Joe Earnshaw, Youth Fellow, IYTT