Since Thursday, young people from across the globe have been meeting with senior leaders from the UN, governments and civil society in Nairobi at the Youth 21 Building for Change conference. The gathering aims to find better ways of engaging youth as leaders and decision-makers in the UN system and more broadly. This weekend, discussions focus on how governments and young people can avoid a “lost generation” of youth excluded from decent jobs. We’re currently investigating these issues for the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, which will examine how skills development programmes can improve the opportunities of marginalized young people for decent jobs and better lives.

As the Youth 21 Report points out, “youth continue to be overrepresented among the world’s unemployed. In 2007, youth comprised only 25% of the working-age population but accounted for more than 40% of the unemployed.” Furthermore, for employed young people in developing countries, “informal, non-secure, and low-wage employment is the norm.”