Towards Inclusive Regional Development with New Youth Leadership.

• Author: Garcia, L. Enrique
• Position: Youth in the Americas - Essay

It's not easy to be a young person today especially if you are a young person in Latin America. But youth today are the protagonists of far-reaching political, social, and culture changes, and they are demonstrating that youth is more than just a word; it is a challenge full of possibilities, risks, and responsibilities.

Young people today know more about the world than the generation before them. They are more connected among themselves than anyone had ever imagined, and the "techno-social" environment they are immersed in has burst open in the last five years. At the same time, there is more democracy and less poverty in the world, though many matters are pending and new challenges for development have also emerged.

Now is the time for Latin American youth to build their sense of citizenship and become adults in a more inclusive region where they are the leaders of a new kind of progress.

In spite of great advances in technology, the real quality of education and jobs, health problems, violence, and the lack of access to basic services continue to be serious problems for youth today.

While young people are more independent and, in Latin America, they are more educated and less poor than before; these advances are not without their tensions and contradictions. As the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Ibero-American Youth Organization (OIJ) have warned, Latin American youth have more access to education but less access to high-quality jobs. They have more ways to communicate, but fewer possibilities to influence collective decisions. They are more exposed to the world and to symbolic goods, but they are less able to realize their expectations because they lack access to material goods.

Youth in the region are now at greater risk of being "neither-nors:" they neither study nor work. Currently 25 percent of all of the young people in Latin America are in this situation. The excluded suffer from a fundamental paradox: they are included in virtual reality and they live in it with intensity, but they are excluded from what is truly real, and they have a serious inability to satisfy their most basic needs.

Though more basic education is available, structural deficits related to the quality of education and inequity of access persist. So the system is producing low skill-levels in a labor market that is increasingly specialized and segmented. Intra-generational inequality persists as well, and the contrast...