PARIS: On World Youth Skills Day, UNICEF called on stakeholders and partners to join hands and invest in equipping youth with the skills and tools they need to thrive and create change for a more prosperous, peaceful, and sustainable future.

In 2014, the United Nations General Assembly designated July 15th as World Youth Skills Day to highlight the need to prepare young people for employment, fulfilling work and entrepreneurship. This annual event facilitates dialogue among youth, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, employers, policymakers, and development partners. It emphasizes the growing importance of sustainable skills, with future projections estimating that 600 million jobs will be required by 2030 to meet global youth employment demands.

For young people to become successful life-long learners, find productive work, take informed decisions that affect their lives and actively engage in their communities, they need to access inclusive, relevant learning and skills dev
elopment opportunities.

Across Eastern and Southern Africa, adolescents and youth face multiple challenges in learning and making the transition from school and higher education into the workforce. These obstacles include a mismatch between skills development and opportunities, a lack of access to flexible, accredited and recognized learning opportunities and a lack of decent work opportunities for youth. Adolescent girls and young women, youth with disabilities, displaced youth and youth from lower wealth quintiles and rural areas are often disadvantaged.

Many young people lack secondary education skills: in the region, only 33 percent of adolescents complete lower secondary, which drops to 24 percent completing upper secondary. In addition, most young people lack the digital skills to thrive in future labour markets.

Youth are not only facing a challenging present, but also an uncertain future. By one estimate, 85 percent of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 have not yet been invented,
putting immense pressure on all stakeholders, including youth, to think creatively to acquire a different set of skills and competencies to secure the jobs of the future. Unless there is a radical transformation of engagement, learning and skills attainment and availability of opportunities, Africa’s youth risk being unable to compete globally and locally in the labour market.

Therefore, there is a need to create work opportunities for some 150 million young workers that will transition into the labor market in the next ten years. This represents an enormous opportunity and a pivotal moment to transform the lives of millions of youth and drive sustainable development and inclusive economic growth across the region.

To leverage this opportunity, UNICEF and key partners are promoting flexible, accredited learning pathways that equip youth with essential skills for academic learning, personal growth, employment and civic engagement in the 21st century. Such skills include foundational skills (basic literacy an
d numeracy), transferable skills or life skills (problem solving, communication, empathy, among others), digital skills, entrepreneurship and technical skills, and green skills.

To equip all youth, including the most vulnerable, with those skills, UNICEF emphasises the importance of flexible and multiple pathways to respond to the needs and interests of adolescents and youth by:

Promoting/creating relevant, flexible, credited learning opportunities (with 21st century knowledge and skills) through multiple pathways (from formal education to non-formal and community settings to the world of work).

Accelerating alternative learning to earning opportunities and transitions into work

Leveraging technology, innovations and new strategic partnerships

Adolescents and youth’s learning and skills development, especially for the most marginalised, is a priority for the organisation’s efforts around the second decade and links directly to the achievement of SDG targets, including ending poverty, enhancing education
and life learning opportunities, promoting employment and decent work for all.

Source: Emirates News Agency