Youth

This publication is the latest instalment in the annual series jointly produced by UN Women and UN DESA. The report provides a comprehensive analysis of gender equality progress across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Halfway to the end point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world is failing to achieve gender equality, making it an increasingly distant goal. If current trends continue, more than 340 million women and girls will still live in extreme poverty by 2030, and close to one in four will experience moderate or severe food insecurity. Growing vulnerability brought on by human-induced climate change is likely to worsen this outlook, as many as 236 million more women and girls will be food-insecure under a worst-case climate scenario. The gender gap in power and leadership positions remains entrenched, and, at the current rate of progress, the next generation of women will still spend on average 2.3 more hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work than men. No country is within reach of eradicating intimate partner violence, and women’s share of workplace management positions will remain below parity even by 2050. Fair progress has been made in girls’ education, but completion rates remain below the universal mark. With the clock ticking, urgency mounts. This report advocates for an integrated, holistic approach to advancing gender equality, involving multistakeholder collaboration and sustained financial backing. Neglecting to amplify efforts and invest in gender parity jeopardizes the entire 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Ever since Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) was officially embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, many assumed that ESD had arrived in formal education settings. In reality however, this is only true to quite a small degree. Its uptake within the UNECE region has been shown to be too slow. Seen in the context of the ever-growing challenges our societies – and especially young people within them – face, this article points to non-formal education (NFE) as a powerful driver of change towards sustainable development. It shows that NFE’s complementary power has been undervalued for too long, and its potential for youth participation has been left almost untapped. Three successful best practice examples from Austria deliver supporting evidence and show how to combine ESD and NFE from a policy implementation perspective. The article concludes that in reforming one-sizefits-all education systems, non-formal education for sustainable development should play a key part.

Report Card 17 explores how 43 OECD/EU countries are faring in providing healthy environments for children. Do children have clean water to drink? Do they have good-quality air to breathe? Are their homes free of lead and mould? How many children live in overcrowded homes? How many have access to green play spaces, safe from road traffic? Data show that a nation’s wealth does not guarantee a healthy environment. Far too many children are deprived of a healthy home, irreversibly damaging their current and future well-being. Beyond children’s immediate environments, over-consumption in some of the world’s richest countries is destroying children’s environments globally. This threatens both children worldwide and future generations. To provide all children with safe and healthy environments, governments, policymakers, businesses and all stakeholders are called to act on a set of policy recommendations.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to school closures around the world, affecting almost 1.6 billion students. The effects of even short disruptions in a child’s schooling on their learning and well-being have been shown to be acute and long lasting. The capacities of education systems to respond to the crisis by delivering remote learning and support to children and families have been diverse yet uneven. This report reviews the emerging evidence on remote learning throughout the global school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic to help guide decision-makers to build more effective, sustainable, and resilient education systems for current and future crises.

This report presents the case for why we all must throw our weight behind a global restoration effort. Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, it explains the crucial role played by ecosystems from forests and farmland to rivers and oceans, and charts the losses that result from our poor stewardship of the planet. While restoration science is a youthful discipline, we already have the knowledge and tools we need to halt degradation and restore ecosystems. Farmers, for instance, can draw on proven restorative practices such as sustainable farming and agroforestry. Landscape approaches that give all stakeholders – including women and minorities – a say in decision-making are simultaneously supporting social and economic development and ecosystem health. And policy makers and financial institutions are realizing the huge need and potential for green investment.

In 2019, there were about 1.2 billion young people – age 15 to 24 – in the world, making up nearly 16 per cent of the global population. UNESCO has long worked with the conviction that the voice of young people matters in shaping a better future, especially at a time when we have to rethink radically the way we deal with our multifaceted heritage and its challenges.

The Report seeks to further the discussion on how youth social entrepreneurship can support youth employment and development while helping accelerate the implementation of the SDGs. To do so, the Report first presents social entrepreneurship and anchors it in the context of the 2030 Agenda. Then, the Report turns toward the situation of youth and examines weather youth social entrepreneurship can offer not only employment opportunities, but also support other elements of youth development such as youth participation. In the third chapter, the Report assesses the potential and the challenges of youth social entrepreneurship. The Report then examines the synergies between technologies and youth social entrepreneurship. The last chapter offers policy guidance to build enabling, responsive and sustainable national ecosystems for young social entrepreneurs.

This report aims to broaden understanding of the multitude of institutional and sociocultural barriers youth face in realizing their potential. It uses findings revealed by a primary research project in six countries in the Asia-Pacific region covering over 10,000 youth aged 18-24, and providing a unique wealth of information from youth talking first-hand about their situation, concerns and hopes. Motivated by requests of ESCAP member States, the report aims to provide insight into the most pressing issues that affect youth inclusion in social, economic and civic domains. The findings are derived from analysing data collected through a comprehensive questionnaire and a series of focus group discussions in 12 cities in the six countries. However, relevance of the findings extends beyond the context of the areas surveyed. Throughout Asia and the Pacific significant numbers of youth are excluded from the impressive socioeconomic advances of recent decades. This report sheds light on these people and how they differ from those who are more privileged. The findings reveal that gender remains a large contributor to inequality, often restricting access to education and employment, and participation in political activities. Nevertheless, those of low wealth, ethnic minorities, certain castes or religious groups are often even more excluded from such spheres, while also receiving fewer opportunities to increase social and human capital, such as through access to associations and the Internet. The report considers the options many developing countries face as they seek to more effectively tap into the potential of youth and progress along the pathways delineated by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It further calls upon policymakers and other stakeholders to pay more attention to the evolving needs and aspirations of youth, and work closely with them, for a more prosperous, inclusive and shared future.

This report focuses on educational inequalities in 41 of the world’s richest countries, all of which are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and/or the European Union (EU). Using the most recent data available, it examines inequalities across childhood -- from access to preschool to expectations of post-secondary education - and explores in depth the relationships between educational inequality and factors such as parents’ occupations, migration background, the child’s gender and school characteristics. The key feature of the report is the league table, which summarizes the extent of educational inequalities at preschool, primary school and secondary school levels.