The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted how we live, learn and work, profoundly affecting our physical and mental health, our social lives and economies. The impact on young people has been especially hard.
In 2021, we are renewing our OECD Youth Action Plan in order to place young people’s concerns at the centre of the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. Together, we can build a transformative recovery, making our economies and societies more resilient, more green and more inclusive.
Now is the time to reflect deeply on the future we want after the crisis. What should our post-COVID world look like? At the OECD, our mission is to help develop better policies for better lives and we need young peoples’ perspective and ideas to help us do this, notably through Youthwise, our new Youth Advisory Board.
The report Governance for Youth, Trust and Intergenerational Justice: Fit for all generations? provides the first comparative assessment of the policies, laws, institutional capacities and governance tools put in place by 34 OECD countries and the European Union and 8 non-member countries to promote youth empowerment and intergenerational justice. It also presents the results from the OECD Youth Governance Survey run among 80+ youth-led organisations in the participating countries. |
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Africa’s fast-growing cities are youthful. More than two-thirds of the residents of some of the continent’s largest cities like Lagos, Dakar, Accra and Abidjan are below the age of 30. How these cities, and hundreds of others, will look like in 20-30 years depends on the ability of urban youth to shape urban development with their ideas, preferences and visions.
In July 2020, we surveyed more than 4 000 young people across 17 countries and 27 cities in West Africa and the Sahel to find out how they feel about their cities – what they like, what they dislike and what they think should be the priorities for their local governments. How is life in your city?
Compared to general programmes, vocational education and training (VET) programmes suffer a double disadvantage as social distancing requirements and the closure of enterprises have made practical and workbased learning that are so crucial for the success of vocational education difficult or impossible. |