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Youth & Children

Youth Statistics

  • Adolescent girls’ access to technology is limited by the societies, communities and families in which they live. In a patriarchal society, it is men who control technology, whether this is ‘new’, such as computers and mobile phones; or ‘old’, such as radios and televisions. For example, in Ghana, only 6.6 per cent of females use internet cafés compared with 16.5 per cent of male youth.
    Source: Children in an Urban World. UNICEF, 2012, p.112-114
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  • Niger and Burundi has the worst girls’ gross primary school graduation rate (the number of children graduating from primary school in any one year divided by the number of children in the age group at which primary school completion should occur) which is  12.29% and 12.77% simultaneously.
    Source: Children in an Urban World. UNICEF, 2012, p.164
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  • Nearly 75 million youth are unemployed around the world, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007. By 2016, the youth unemployment rate is projected to remain at the same high level.
    Source: Global Employment Trends for Youth, International Labor Office, 2012, p. 7
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  • Youth unemployment rates are significantly higher than adult rates in all geographic regions, though with considerable variation. In 2010, the global youth unemployment rate remained at 12.6%, dramatically overshadowing the global adult unemployment rate of 4.8%
    Source: World Youth Report, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2011, p.16 (International Labour Organization, 2011a and United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2011)
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  • In all regions, by the age of 24, young women’s labour force participation trails young men’s.
    Source: World Bank, Girls and Young Women, 2010
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  • Despite important gains in education among young women, their outcomes continue to lag behind those of young men. Globally, in 2010, 56.3 per cent of young males participated in the labour force, against 40.8 per cent of young females.
    Source: World Youth Report, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2011, p.21 (International Labour Organization, 2011b, p. 10)
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  • There is a positive correlation between poor youth employment outcomes and inequality. Rising youth unemployment in recent years has increased inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) by 4 percentage points in all advanced countries and by as much as 8 percentage points in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
    Source: Tackling the youth employment crisis:  A macroeconomic perspective, Makiko Matsumoto, Martina Hengge and Iyanatul Islam, International Labor Office, 2012, p. 1

Child Statistics

At the height of nationwide lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, up to 1.6 billion children were affected by school closures, causing the largest mass disruption of education in modern history. To address these gaps, more than 90 per cent of the world’s education ministries have adopted some type of remote learning policy. However, 2.2 billion — or two-thirds of children and young people aged 25 years or less — do not have internet access at home, according to the latest analysis from UNICEF and ITU.

A stillbirth occurs every 16 seconds somewhere in the world. This means that every year, about 2 million babies are stillborn – a loss that reaches far beyond the loss of life. It has a traumatic long-lasting impact on women and their families around the world, who often endure profound psychological suffering as well as stigma from their communities, even in high-income countries. Perhaps even more tragically, the majority of these deaths could have been avoided with high-quality care antenatally and during birth.