Developing Job Skills among Disadvantaged Youth

Globalization and the resulting emergence of new industries has made it increasingly important to train poor rural youth in the skills demanded by the changing market. 

To help poor young people get jobs that pay better, the World Bank held consultations with civil society entitled Job-Linked Skills Development for Disadvantaged Youth in New Delhi on 25th August 2006.

The major issues that emerged from the discussions included:

• Create jobs in rural areas rather than encouraging “urban” jobs
• Link unorganized youth with employers from the unorganized and organized sector
• Reach out to the remotest villages/ poorest of the poor
• Map current and future job trends to the skills of migrating rural youth
• Provide vocational training as part of the school curriculum and revamp vocational training institutes
• Train youth for self employment in the non farm sector
• Develop institutional mechanisms between the government, private sector, and NGOs to take this agenda forward

Participants in the consultation included senior government officials, representatives from the private sector, donor agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as young people who had benefited from experiments in creating jobs for disadvantaged youth.

Deliberations from the conference are to feed into the wider civil society discussions being held in Singapore on September 17, 2006 as part of the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings.

Unemployment and underemployment are critical issues in developing countries like India with huge young populations that are still largely dependent on agriculture. India has more than 340 million people in the agricultural labor class whose wage rate is among the lowest across sectors of the economy. 

Development and growth, in the long term, necessarily entails moving labor out of agriculture and into more productive jobs in the manufacturing and services sectors.  This will result in large scale migration from the rural to the urban areas in search of livelihoods. Already, urban- rural disparities have worsened in recent years.