Breaking the Barriers to Youth Inclusion
Over three years have elapsed since the Tunisian Revolution. Yet the aspirations of the younger generation that sparked sweeping changes across the Middle East and North Africa Region remain unmet. Unemployment among young people aged 15–29 increased after the revolution, with an official youth unemployment rate of 33.2 percent in 2013, according to the most recent International Labour Organisation School-to-Work Transition survey (ILO 2014). Even though youth played a leading role in bringing about a change in the regime, they have been unable to secure a role in decision making and feel that they are not consulted on issues that directly affect them. Nevertheless, there are positive manifestations in the post-revolution period. The new Tunisian Constitution, passed in January 2014, enshrines youth participation as a key pillar of the social, economic, and political development of the country.1 However, given the time required to translate and implement constitutional principles into laws and practice, youth participation remains at the formative stage.
The study provides an analysis of the aspirations and needs of young Tunisians, taking into account both noneconomic and economic measures of exclusion that were at the root of the revolution. In particular, it highlights:
• the continuing rise of youth activism outside formally established political institutions as well as the need to support the transition of Tunisian youth from protest to active citizenship; and
• young people who are not in education, employment, or training (NEETs) as the category most affected by economic exclusion, and the need to ensure their socioeconomic integration through tailored policies and programming.
Active citizenship and civil participation among young Tunisians will be critical to sustaining the country’s regained positive forward momentum. Constructive dialogue between Tunisia’s youth and public institutions, together with broader civil society, political organizations, and the private sector, will be critical in addressing the most pressing barriers to youth inclusion. Facilitating youth inclusion enables the mobilization of the new generation as an economic and social resource, which can directly contribute to sustaining the stability and economic growth of the country. Participatory decision making in the design and implementation of youth policies and programs and in the management of civil society organizations (CSOs) yields benefits for all stakeholders, and is likely to increase the impact of public investments.
This report identifies specific categories of excluded youth and characterizes them according to multiple factors, including regional disparities, gender inequalities, and limited access to education, employment, and social goods. The findings help to identify crucial barriers to youth inclusion faced by young women and men from different backgrounds, especially from marginalized regions, and describe the youth’s perceived and actual exclusion from social, economic, and political opportunities that drove the Tunisian Revolution (Ayeb 2011). Overall, the report notes that while the situation of unemployed university graduates has often dominated discourse and policy, other socioeconomic groups of youth face distinct challenges to inclusion, which also require the attention and actions of policy makers.
In particular, the report highlights NEETs as the most excluded group. NEETs exemplify youth inactivity and discouragement, a more worrisome condition than youth unemployment, which does not include disengaged youth who have given up looking for formal sector (or other) employment (United Nations 2013). In Tunisia, young women are more likely to be NEETs. Highly educated youth, although affected by exclusion, constitute less than one-fifth of all NEETs. Early school leavers are the most highly represented in the NEET subgroup, irrespective of gender.
A multidimensional approach is used to identify and address the social, economic, political, and cultural barriers encountered by young Tunisians. Marginalization associated with social exclusion tends to occur simultaneously along multiple axes, so policies that address only one aspect of marginalization, such as improved access to education, may be too narrow to overcome exclusion more generally (World Bank 2013f). A combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods is used as well as an assessment of current youth programs and services in order to ask a range of questions: Why do young people continue to be active outside formal institutional venues as opposed to inside them? What channels are needed to increase youth trust in institutions and voice in decision making? Why are certain groups of youth over-represented among the inactive and unemployed or those working in the informal sector? How effectively is public policy at addressing the constraints that youth face? While also drawing on quantified measures, the analysis benefits from qualitative, narrative interpretations and solutions that emerge from young respondents, thereby attempting to avoid technocratic prescriptions that do not resonate with the discourse of youth themselves. This approach allows an analysis of the range of economic, social, and political exclusion, as well as examination of the ways in which they are mutually reinforcing.
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